IPv6 Adoption in 2026

They seem to have been averaging about two services per week for the past year. But they have a lot of services...

Yeah. There's a type of person who's obsessed with "cleanliness". For such a person, the goal is to have exactly one protocol on The Internet.

Such a person would lose their goddamn minds if they had to actually work as a WAN administrator or datacenter operator.

One of IPv6's purposes is to reduce pressure on the IPv4 address space. I don't expect IPv4 to get deactivated within the lifetime of any current HN reader; there's really no point in doing so. I expect the future for noncommercial sites to be "globally-routable IPv6 service, and IPv4 service by way of a CGN", which is how things are set up today in some parts of the world.

IPv6 will be the default, with v4 as a fallback for folks need to talk with others who can't be bothered to update their software or kit.

(As a side note, Google and APNIC disagree significantly on China's deployment percentage -- 6.5% vs 52% -- so there's actually something like another half a billion v6 users not represented in Google's stats which would push the world percentage from ~48% to ~56%, and that "x years ago" stat to 10 years ago.)

> In the past thirty years, I have not encountered a use-case where...

For me, the two things IPv6 does that I care about are

1) I get at least one globally-routable IP address for every machine on my LAN that I wish to have one.

2) I get multiple globally-routable subnets so that I can have networks on my LAN that are isolated from all other LAN networks, but are still able to have globally-routable addresses.

To make #2 work, you do need networking gear that's slightly better than bottom-of-the-barrel so that you can set up VLANs. If network gear vendors cared, they could pretty easily make those sorts of features standard in even bottom-of-the-barrel gear, but they do not, so they are not.

You need a separate protocol (like HIP or LISP) on top to map the identifier to its current network location, and at that point you're no longer limited by the size of the underlying address space.

Switching out the fundamental addressing protocol of the Internet is hard. You have to herd the cats of the hundreds of thousands of operators, device, operating system, and application vendors, and as long as the old protocol still works, no one has a strong incentive to switch. But they have a big distinctive of missing out on customers, or having to figure out the new protocol.

Any IPvNG is going to run face first into the same incentive problems that v6 has.