My opinion: IPv6 is used by nobody, nobody cares about IPv6 except for us tech nerds and in five years it will still be nowhere.
But still, nice if you want to try it out and test with it.
But still, nice if you want to try it out and test with it.
Nobody cares that your app is written in Rails of NodeJS. People care that it works and does what matters to them. IPv4 is doomed to not work at some point so we "tech nerds" have to care and do something about it.
> IPv6 is used by nobody
From the top of my mind, many of the french ISPs have IPv6 ready on the customer side, a radio button click away, while some are even on by default. I can readily assume that today, every worthwhile machine connected to a LAN supports at least IPv6 local scope. Also, every single Mac out there uses an IPv6 VPN (over IPwhatever) when (at least) Back to my Mac is active (ifconfig utun0).
> in five years it will still be nowhere
Unless you settle for impractical definitions of "nowhere" as "not ubiquitous", it is definitely there already. IPv6 does solve real problems today, locally and globally.
I think this is one of the key points that certain people end up missing.
Windows Vista and later can do IPv6 by default, recent versions of OS X will do it by default as well. All an ISP needs to do is send a user a router which can handle IPv6 traffic - and suddenly the entire network will start doing IPv6 traffic with places like Google who are IPv6 ready.
It will just happen! Add the IPv6 ready equipment and the traffic will flow. The only problem is certain ISPs who are still stuck with their heads in sand, not providing IPv6 connectivity, and still providing customers equipment which can't deal with IPv6 traffic - some of which might not be possible to upgrade.
January 2011: 0.24%
January 2012: 0.41%
January 2013: 1.07%
Not-quite January 2014: 2.54%
Which means that it will be ubiquitous within 5 years, if it carries on this trend.
2016: 10%
2017: 20%
2018: 40%
2019: 80%
Not quite ubiquity. Also, expect some flattening of the growth rate.
I'd also like to mention that we do not have a static IP, it just changes less often than it did with DSL.
[1] http://www.kabeldeutschland.de/portal/faq/article/id/631 (German)
People will start to care when IPv6 takeup hits critical mass and we start seeing services optimised for it. When people start seeing services they want to use not working as well through layers of NAT, they start asking their ISPs why they are having a problem and their friends on other ISPs aren't. Maybe at some point services will start charging a premium for IPv4 access (so IPv6 users aren't subsidising those who haven't moved forward yet) like on retail business did for IE6/7 users (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18440979) then people will care. That seems extreme though and might alienate users, less severe option would be to serve more adverts.
There are some places where things are already heading towards being IPv6 only. A friend of mine noticed this when out east for a work related trip, the hotel he was in provided Internet access but IPv6 only internally. They provided a 6-to-4 gateway so IPv4 only sites worked fine (with everyone from several places looking to be coming from the same address) but your device had to speak IPv6 to connect to the network in the first place (which his phone didn't).
When I'm working from outside home, I use a tinc VPN to access my IPv6 services, and also redirect my IPv6 traffic through my home network.
Other fun experiment: if you are ipv6-enabled, look at the percentage of bittorrent peers who are in ipv6 vs ipv4. IPv6 is growing.
It will be a deal in 1-2 years. The world rotates fast these days.