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IPv6 adoption has been on an exponential growth curve for a long time, with an inflection point where it really started taking off around 2013. Google has some

IPv6 adoption has been on an exponential growth curve for a long time, with an inflection point where it really started taking off around 2013. Google has some very solid stats to back this up https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html There are absolutely motivations and incentives for the advancement of IPv6, the most obvious of which is the exhaustion of IPv4 address space. The Notice the inflection point of IPv6 adoption in 2013 - this occurs in tandem with the real exhaustion of the IPv4 space. As IPv4 address space becomes increasingly expensive the financial incentives will grow stronger - recent block sales have the price approaching $18 PER IP: http://ipv4marketgroup.com/ipv4-pricing/ http://ipv4marketgroup.com/ipv4-pricing/ Cellular providers have particularly incentives to adopt IPv6, given that by just about any account there are more mobile devices in use globally than the entire IPv4 address space. Odds are good that if you’re using a major cellular provider, you’re actually accessing the internet over IPv6 directly. T-Mobile is apparently already in the process of decommissioning IPv4 entirely. Work on IPv6 began nearly in tandem with work on NAT, which lasted as a stopgap longer than most expected. Recognizing major risks to a global system and developing a complete solution a few years in advance of necessary adoption with the only miss being the estimate of how long the stopgap solution would remain viable doesn’t sound like a miss to me. The IETF engineers deserve a little more credit.

yholio 8y ago
An exponential works in an unlimited population or for as long as it's effects are negligible compared to total population size. Once you have converted a significant part of the population, the number of possible targets starts to drop exponentially. You will reach for the highest hanging fruits, sysadmins who don't give a crap, nutcases that hate IPv6 for killing their dog, legacy devices that only Bob knew how to manage but we fired Bob back in '98, and so on. There's every reason to believe reaching a point where IPv6 is widely enough supported to allow you to turn off your IPv4 address, say over 99%, will take the same number of decades as has taken to get to 50%. You can already see this reverse inflexion in countries that are further along like US and Germany.
hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
> There are absolutely motivations and incentives for the advancement of IPv6, the most obvious of which is the exhaustion of IPv4 address space. Which is exactly my point: a system could have been decided that only focused on increasing the address space (in as backwards-compatible a way as possible), but instead v6 tried to roll "everything and the kitchen sink" into it, while making the address space transition about as difficult as possible. The fact that IP v4 addresses are so expensive just highlights the failure of v6. If v6 had been successful, v4 addresses should have a value of $0.

yholio 8y ago

An exponential works in an unlimited population or for as long as it's effects are negligible compared to total population size. Once you have converted a significant part of the population, the number of possible targets starts to drop exponentially. You will reach for the highest hanging fruits, sysadmins who don't give a crap, nutcases that hate IPv6 for killing their dog, legacy devices that only Bob knew how to manage but we fired Bob back in '98, and so on. There's every reason to believe reaching a point where IPv6 is widely enough supported to allow you to turn off your IPv4 address, say over 99%, will take the same number of decades as has taken to get to 50%. You can already see this reverse inflexion in countries that are further along like US and Germany.

hn_throwaway_99 8y ago

> There are absolutely motivations and incentives for the advancement of IPv6, the most obvious of which is the exhaustion of IPv4 address space. Which is exactly my point: a system could have been decided that only focused on increasing the address space (in as backwards-compatible a way as possible), but instead v6 tried to roll "everything and the kitchen sink" into it, while making the address space transition about as difficult as possible. The fact that IP v4 addresses are so expensive just highlights the failure of v6. If v6 had been successful, v4 addresses should have a value of $0.