3 ms·

They should have just extended IPv4 similar to how UTF-8 works.

• supertrope 8y ago
  Which would still require everyone to buy new routers.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • kazinator 8y ago
    People bought several generations of new routers since work on IPv6 began in the early 1990's. If that work had been sanely scoped, we'd all be using IPv6 by now. People bought new routers, for example, because of faster ethernet and fibre. Faster switching, more ports. Bigger routing tables. At the last hop, also due to Wi-Fi and rounds of newer Wi-Fi. A smart upgrade to IP could have been hammered out by a team of half a dozen skilled engineers well before Y2K rolled in.
    • Dagger2 8y ago
      We already have the best upgrade that's actually possible given the design of IPv4 -- the fundamental problem is a combination of the pigeonhole principle (which means there's no way to allow unmodified v4-only hosts to talk to v6 hosts) and the fact that there's nobody in a position to force people to use the necessary modifications. As a result, we end up with several generations of hardware that support everything necessary but where the people who wrote the config for them are too lazy to actually turn it on.