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What are the reasons for slow IPv6 adoption a whole two decades after notification by IETF? I am assuming the demand for IPv4 address blocks is mainly driven by

What are the reasons for slow IPv6 adoption a whole two decades after notification by IETF? I am assuming the demand for IPv4 address blocks is mainly driven by backwards compatibility requirements.

marcan_42 6y ago
Lazy ISPs. Servers won't go IPv6-only until most users have IPv6. This it's on providers to take the initiative to deploy IPv6. Some have. Some have not. For example, approximately nobody has IPv6 in Spain. It's one of the countries furthest behind in dual-stack adoption. This is entirely the fault of Spanish ISPs. ISPs won't be forced to deploy dual stack IPv6 until IPv6 only servers are commonplace, and IPv6 only servers won't exist until that wouldn't lose them a significant fraction of users. And thus progress is glacial.
- nerdponx 6y ago
  This. I have Comcast Xfinity in the USA (local monopoly, I would use a different ISP if I could) and they just don't offer IPv6. The rep on the phone seemed surprised that I would even ask.
  - mdaniel 6y ago
    Surely you mean static IPv6, because of the 3 different cities I've been forced to use Xfinity (even on their lowest plan Internet), I have been given IPv6 leases and I for sure didn't call anyone Or, another certainly plausible explanation is that your router either doesn't support IPv6 or it is disabled
    - nerdponx 6y ago
      I asked when I was setting up service. I can try to enable it in my router and see if I get an IPv6 address.
aboringusername 6y ago
I suspect tracking and analytics are also part of the problem. Imagine every single IPv4 IP ban now being rendered entirely and utterly useless. DRM/Geolocation blocks are also common and IP's are used quite widely in many software systems, most are likely to only accept a v4 address/format (perhaps terrible regex too). Detectives and other governments rely on IPv4 addresses as part of 'evidence', and storing V6 uses more storage and is much more complicated generally due to the much longer address space. We won't see the internet migrate to IPv6 entirely for another 20/30 years from now.
toast0 6y ago
There was a long period of chicken and egg problems: no IPv6 users, so no IPv6 services, so no IPv6 users; that's over now, there are enough users and services (even if they're mostly CDN frontends) to justify turning on IPv6 as a service or a user, although maybe not enough to require IPv6 as either. The other reasons are all about the difficulty of the change. IPv6 is not an incremental update to IPv4. There's a ton of changes that are just totally different. Arp is replaced by ICMPv6, dhcp is mostly replaced by slaac, but dhcpv6 was added later, header processing is different. All that means, it's a good bit of work to get IPv6 to run as well as IPv4, and chicken and egg issues made it hard to justify doing the work, and hard to verify the performance. Finally, work towards making transition easier was only started much later than the protocol design. Making it easy to use, and easy to switch to should have happened during design. Things like continuing to use ARP for IPv6 would have been simple (arp is extensible), and reduced implementation work, and gotten things moving quicker. OTOH, you would be stuck with ARP forever, instead of ICMPv6, but it doesn't seem like a big difference to me.

What are the reasons for slow IPv6 adoption a whole two decades after notification by IETF? I am assuming the demand for IPv4 address blocks is mainly driven by backwards compatibility requirements.

marcan_42 6y ago

Lazy ISPs. Servers won't go IPv6-only until most users have IPv6. This it's on providers to take the initiative to deploy IPv6. Some have. Some have not. For example, approximately nobody has IPv6 in Spain. It's one of the countries furthest behind in dual-stack adoption. This is entirely the fault of Spanish ISPs. ISPs won't be forced to deploy dual stack IPv6 until IPv6 only servers are commonplace, and IPv6 only servers won't exist until that wouldn't lose them a significant fraction of users. And thus progress is glacial.

nerdponx 6y ago
This. I have Comcast Xfinity in the USA (local monopoly, I would use a different ISP if I could) and they just don't offer IPv6. The rep on the phone seemed surprised that I would even ask.
- mdaniel 6y ago
  Surely you mean static IPv6, because of the 3 different cities I've been forced to use Xfinity (even on their lowest plan Internet), I have been given IPv6 leases and I for sure didn't call anyone Or, another certainly plausible explanation is that your router either doesn't support IPv6 or it is disabled
  - nerdponx 6y ago
    I asked when I was setting up service. I can try to enable it in my router and see if I get an IPv6 address.

aboringusername 6y ago

I suspect tracking and analytics are also part of the problem. Imagine every single IPv4 IP ban now being rendered entirely and utterly useless. DRM/Geolocation blocks are also common and IP's are used quite widely in many software systems, most are likely to only accept a v4 address/format (perhaps terrible regex too). Detectives and other governments rely on IPv4 addresses as part of 'evidence', and storing V6 uses more storage and is much more complicated generally due to the much longer address space. We won't see the internet migrate to IPv6 entirely for another 20/30 years from now.

toast0 6y ago

There was a long period of chicken and egg problems: no IPv6 users, so no IPv6 services, so no IPv6 users; that's over now, there are enough users and services (even if they're mostly CDN frontends) to justify turning on IPv6 as a service or a user, although maybe not enough to require IPv6 as either. The other reasons are all about the difficulty of the change. IPv6 is not an incremental update to IPv4. There's a ton of changes that are just totally different. Arp is replaced by ICMPv6, dhcp is mostly replaced by slaac, but dhcpv6 was added later, header processing is different. All that means, it's a good bit of work to get IPv6 to run as well as IPv4, and chicken and egg issues made it hard to justify doing the work, and hard to verify the performance. Finally, work towards making transition easier was only started much later than the protocol design. Making it easy to use, and easy to switch to should have happened during design. Things like continuing to use ARP for IPv6 would have been simple (arp is extensible), and reduced implementation work, and gotten things moving quicker. OTOH, you would be stuck with ARP forever, instead of ICMPv6, but it doesn't seem like a big difference to me.