4 ms·

IPv6 worldwide adoption is at just under 30%: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html If the c

by jl6 7y ago

IPv6 worldwide adoption is at just under 30%: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html If the current growth rate continues, it looks like it will reach 100% by about 2035.

big_chungus 7y ago
I'd guess adoption will look less like an exponential or straight increasoming function and more like a sigmoid. As more people adopt, those left will be the increasingly resistant. Eventually, IPv4 re-sale markets will get pricey enough that bean-counters will insist.
- tialaramex 7y ago
  I doubt it on the bean counters, resale will trail off and stop being interesting. The IPv4 address space isn't big enough for the whole world, but it's easily big enough to indefinitely handle millions of holdouts left on legacy systems. Eventually they stop being enough traffic to make them uninteresting to the backbone, and the backbone becomes IPv6-only - but the v4 Internet still exists, in a sense, as a bunch of networks connected via IPv6 translation gateways. Perhaps for a century or more. Right now if you're a large organisation it makes sense to go IPv6 only internally and translate at your border. All your address headaches vanish immediately (remember trying to figure out how to cut up groups of systems so they'd fit in neat binary subnets in IPv4? Not a problem in IPv6, any conceivable number of machines will go in a one-size-fits-all IPv6 /64 Ethernet subnet) and you now have no future IT transition problems, because internally transition is finished. You own some translation gateways to connect your IPv6 clients to anything from the legacy IPv4 Internet and over time the traffic through those decreases so that cost will diminish. Whether the rest of the world takes 50 years or 15 to upgrade it's just a tweak to the budget for the translation gateways, everything else stays the same for you.
paulsutter 7y ago
Wrong interpretation: the linked chart shows client-side adoption among Google users In practice today IPv6 is a kind of high functionality NAT for consumer devices. A more interesting statistic would be server-side adoption.
- jl6 7y ago
  "Google users" is approximately everybody, and surely client-side adoption is what drives server-side adoption?
  - paulsutter 7y ago
    If it’s not measured we don’t know
  - cat199 7y ago
    > "Google users" is approximately everybody perhaps every 'body', but not at all every 'device'..
- judge2020 7y ago
  And more importantly, server-side adoption excluding Cloudflare, or at least a breakdown by IP and not by website.
  - sp332 7y ago
    Instead of excluding CF, I'd like to see server stats weighted by popularity. I'd bet that the concentration of traffic to just a few mega-sites means most people can now get by just fine with IPv6.
    - smacktoward 7y ago
      You might be surprised. For reasons I can't begin to fathom, a coffee shop near me used to have its wifi router set up to only permit connections to external sites over IPv6. I was legitimately surprised at how many sites I couldn't access from there, including sites from Fortune 50 companies and big tech firms, who you'd expect to be among those who'd be on top of this sort of thing. (Including, ahem, HN.)
      - WorldMaker 7y ago
        Enterprise has a lot less pressure to switch, because they have existing capital investments into, for instance, large, expensive IPv4-only firewalls that aren't currently "broken", and large private IPv4 subnets already walled off with enough IP addresses for their device/asset catalogs. It maybe shouldn't be a surprise that IPv6 has seen much faster consumer adoption comparatively, as consumer ISPs face much less steady/predictable device growth and sometimes much more complex routing scenarios (cell towers have much more complicated internet traffic routing needs than wired ethernet in an office park somewhere).
tyingq 7y ago
Would be more interesting if you net out mobile.
magicalhippo 7y ago
I just disabled IPv6 at home. Again. Been running it for a year now, but ended in tears. Again. Gave up on trying to figure out how to make it all just work. I'd rather take one public IP that works than 9223372036854775808 that doesn't. Mainly there seems to be a big disconnect between how IPv6 is designed and intended to be used (according to modern RFCs), and how at least my ISP actually deploys it. For one they only give me a /64, which isn't compatible with modern IPv6 ways. In addition they do so using DHCPv6, which means my prefix changes every now and then. All those internal services that got their own IP needs separate DynDNS entries. All those firewall rules opening ports for those services? Yeah they need to be manually updated. Local DNS resolution fails because the DHCP server in pfSense sends out the public IPv6 address as the primary DNS rather than the local IPv4 I added manually to try to override it, so now my devices try to contact a DNS server that doesn't exist. I'm sure some day it'll actually just work for me...
jpeeler 7y ago
Would love to see the time slider on the per-country adoption map.

by jl6 7y ago

big_chungus 7y ago

I'd guess adoption will look less like an exponential or straight increasoming function and more like a sigmoid. As more people adopt, those left will be the increasingly resistant. Eventually, IPv4 re-sale markets will get pricey enough that bean-counters will insist.

tialaramex 7y ago
I doubt it on the bean counters, resale will trail off and stop being interesting. The IPv4 address space isn't big enough for the whole world, but it's easily big enough to indefinitely handle millions of holdouts left on legacy systems. Eventually they stop being enough traffic to make them uninteresting to the backbone, and the backbone becomes IPv6-only - but the v4 Internet still exists, in a sense, as a bunch of networks connected via IPv6 translation gateways. Perhaps for a century or more. Right now if you're a large organisation it makes sense to go IPv6 only internally and translate at your border. All your address headaches vanish immediately (remember trying to figure out how to cut up groups of systems so they'd fit in neat binary subnets in IPv4? Not a problem in IPv6, any conceivable number of machines will go in a one-size-fits-all IPv6 /64 Ethernet subnet) and you now have no future IT transition problems, because internally transition is finished. You own some translation gateways to connect your IPv6 clients to anything from the legacy IPv4 Internet and over time the traffic through those decreases so that cost will diminish. Whether the rest of the world takes 50 years or 15 to upgrade it's just a tweak to the budget for the translation gateways, everything else stays the same for you.

paulsutter 7y ago

Wrong interpretation: the linked chart shows client-side adoption among Google users In practice today IPv6 is a kind of high functionality NAT for consumer devices. A more interesting statistic would be server-side adoption.

jl6 7y ago
"Google users" is approximately everybody, and surely client-side adoption is what drives server-side adoption?
- paulsutter 7y ago
  If it’s not measured we don’t know
- cat199 7y ago
  > "Google users" is approximately everybody perhaps every 'body', but not at all every 'device'..
judge2020 7y ago
And more importantly, server-side adoption excluding Cloudflare, or at least a breakdown by IP and not by website.
- sp332 7y ago
  Instead of excluding CF, I'd like to see server stats weighted by popularity. I'd bet that the concentration of traffic to just a few mega-sites means most people can now get by just fine with IPv6.
  - smacktoward 7y ago
    You might be surprised. For reasons I can't begin to fathom, a coffee shop near me used to have its wifi router set up to only permit connections to external sites over IPv6. I was legitimately surprised at how many sites I couldn't access from there, including sites from Fortune 50 companies and big tech firms, who you'd expect to be among those who'd be on top of this sort of thing. (Including, ahem, HN.)
    - WorldMaker 7y ago
      Enterprise has a lot less pressure to switch, because they have existing capital investments into, for instance, large, expensive IPv4-only firewalls that aren't currently "broken", and large private IPv4 subnets already walled off with enough IP addresses for their device/asset catalogs. It maybe shouldn't be a surprise that IPv6 has seen much faster consumer adoption comparatively, as consumer ISPs face much less steady/predictable device growth and sometimes much more complex routing scenarios (cell towers have much more complicated internet traffic routing needs than wired ethernet in an office park somewhere).

tyingq 7y ago

Would be more interesting if you net out mobile.

magicalhippo 7y ago

I just disabled IPv6 at home. Again. Been running it for a year now, but ended in tears. Again. Gave up on trying to figure out how to make it all just work. I'd rather take one public IP that works than 9223372036854775808 that doesn't. Mainly there seems to be a big disconnect between how IPv6 is designed and intended to be used (according to modern RFCs), and how at least my ISP actually deploys it. For one they only give me a /64, which isn't compatible with modern IPv6 ways. In addition they do so using DHCPv6, which means my prefix changes every now and then. All those internal services that got their own IP needs separate DynDNS entries. All those firewall rules opening ports for those services? Yeah they need to be manually updated. Local DNS resolution fails because the DHCP server in pfSense sends out the public IPv6 address as the primary DNS rather than the local IPv4 I added manually to try to override it, so now my devices try to contact a DNS server that doesn't exist. I'm sure some day it'll actually just work for me...

jpeeler 7y ago

Would love to see the time slider on the per-country adoption map.