8 ms·

It's hard to adopt something that schools don't teach. I know someone who graduated from UCI with a CompSci degree with a specialization in networking, just bef

It's hard to adopt something that schools don't teach. I know someone who graduated from UCI with a CompSci degree with a specialization in networking, just before the COVID19 pandemic began. He recalled that the networking courses he took did not cover IPv6 at all, except to describe the address format (i.e. 128 bits, written as hexadecimal, colon-separated). Everything he learned about IPv6, he had to learn on his own or on the job. A standard that has been published for over two decades, heavily used for over a decade, and critical in the worldwide growth of the Internet, was treated as an afterthought by one of the premier universities in the US. Obvious disclaimer: This is a sample size of 1, and an anecdote is not data, yada yada. I'm not involved in academia, and have no insight into the adoption of IPv6 in CompSci networking curricula on a broader level.

alt227 9mo ago
IPv6 was superceded by NAT a long time ago. It will die a slw and quiet death which is why it is now being ignored by training facilities and experts worldwide.
- MBCook 9mo ago
  It was? Isn’t it what all the cell phones networks use these days? And most ISP’s? They may hand the end user device a IPv4 address but don’t they actually use IPv6?
  - alt227 9mo ago
    Yes as I said in a sibling post the telcos are the only ones using it, and that is the only reason that graphs like the google client one exist. That is only because it already exists and is cheaper than using NAT when you have hundreds of millions of clients. IPv6 only ISPs will never leave the mobile space.
    - kstrauser 9mo ago
      “The largest ISPs are the only ones using it” is another way of describing it as ubiquitous.
      - alt227 9mo ago
        I disagree. If they were the largest ISPs then adoption would already be over 50% instead of stalling below it. I would say its more "Wireless only ISPs are the only ones using it"
        kstrauser 9mo ago
        > I would say its more "Wireless only ISPs are the only ones using it" So… the largest ISPs. Recent number show about 94% of Americans have cell phones and 92% of American households have Internet connections. In raw numbers, that’s about 300M cell phones and 111M households. If zero fixed ISPs support IPv6, that’d still be about 75% of total Internet connections that do.
        alt227 9mo ago
        > So… the largest ISPs. Yep, a few gatekeepers of a single device space. Your numbers are wrong, seee the google graph everybody is pointing to: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
        patmorgan23 9mo ago
        Name a large isp not using V6
        alt227 9mo ago
        They are all using IPv6. Name one which has stopped using IPv4.
        kstrauser 9mo ago
        Goalposts -> thataway.
    - lxgr 9mo ago
      Maybe in the US. I've seen IPv6-only connections via DS-Lite in more than one other country on wired home ISPs.
- patrickmcnamara 9mo ago
  https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
  - alt227 9mo ago
    People love this graph and regularly tout it as if it explains full internet usage. Especially when they dont bother to add any explanation or comment alongside it. This graph is mainly due to the fact that telcos use IPv6 for mobile devices, nothing more. Over time you will see that graph flatline and peter out as mobile device uage reaches critical mass.
    - lazide 9mo ago
      Every major ISP in the US, India, and most of the rest of Asia that I’ve seen is handing out and using IPv6 now too. Hell, chances are if you got a new router (like any new client) for your ISP, you’d be on v6 too.
      - alt227 9mo ago
        Yep, and even with all those countries with their billions of mobile devices IPv6 use still hasnt even reached 50%. Pretty much all ISPs hand out both IPv6 and IPv4 addresses to their clients, this is nothing new. When they start only issueing IPv6 IPs is when it would start truly taking off, but it will never get to that point and it will never happen.
        lazide 9mo ago
        Looks like it’s right at 50% and rapidly increasing. [https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html] What exactly are you going on about? 5-10 years for the old devices to be EOL’d, and we’ll likely be at 95%.
        nine_k 9mo ago
- DrewADesign 9mo ago
  Digital Ocean didn’t even have an ipv6 address on by default in the droplet I created last week. It’s just a switch to flip, but I’ll bet the support costs of hobbyists/enthusiasts not realizing they needed to also write firewall rules, make sure ports weren’t open for databases and things like that for ipv6.
  - PaulHoule 9mo ago
    It's a "just doesn't work" experience every time that I try it and I don't experience any value from it, it's not like there isn't anything I can connect to on IPv6 that I can't connect to on IPv4. My ISP has finally mastered providing me with reliable albeit slow DSL. Fiber would change my life, there just isn't any point in asking for IPv6. Also note those bloated packets are death for many modern applications like VoIP.
    - Spooky23 9mo ago
      Exactly. Spectrum delivers good IPv6 service in my area. I tried it when I upgraded my gateway. All of my devices are assigned 4 IPv6 IPs, hostnames are replaced by auto assigned stuff from the ISP, and lots of random things don’t work. I went from being pumped to learn more to realizing I’m going to invest a lot of time and I could not identify and tangible benefit.
      - tjohns 9mo ago
        The biggest tangible benefit is you don't need to worry about NAT port mapping any more. Every device can have a public address, and you can have multiple servers exposing services on the same port without a conflict. (The flip side is having a network-level firewall is more important than ever.) You also don't have to worry about running a DHCP server anymore, at least on small networks. The simplicity of SLAAC is a breath of fresh air, and removes DHCP as a single point of failure for a network.
        whatevaa 9mo ago
        Few people care about exposing a server in the first place, even fewer care about multiple servers on a single port.
- anon7000 9mo ago
  What are you even basing that on? Here are some facts: - You have to pay money to get a static IPv4 address for cloud machines on eg AWS. Anything needing a static IPv4 will cost more and more as demand increases. NAT doesn’t exactly fix that. - Mainstream IoT protocols have a hard dependency on IPv6 (eg Matter/Thread). Not to mention plenty of 5g deployments. - Many modern networks quietly use IPv6 internally. I mean routing is simpler without NAT. So it almost definitely won’t die. It’s more likely it’ll slowly and quietly continue growing behind the scenes, even if consumers are still seeing IPv4 on their home networks.
  - cyberax 9mo ago
    Matter/Thread use private IPv6 addresses so it's just an implementation detail. Nobody is exposing light switches to the public Internet.
  - hdgvhicv 9mo ago
    IPv4 addresses have been dropping in price for a few years and are cheaper in real terms than at my point in the last 15
    - throw0101a 9mo ago
      > IPv4 addresses have been dropping in price for a few years and are cheaper in real terms than at my point in the last 15 More IPv6 deployments may (ironically?) help reduce IPv4 prices as you can get IPv6 'for free' and have Internet connectivity (and not have to worry about exhaustion in any practical way). Doing CG-NAT could reduce the number IPv4 addresses you need to acquire.
      - hdgvhicv 9mo ago
        IPv4 addresses are basically free - indeed they are a profit centre. At $20 an address that’s $2 a year at most (10% ROI) where many charge 20 times that ($5/month isn’t unheard of)
  - wolvoleo 9mo ago
    NAT fixes it in the sense that blocks become available when providers switch to CGNAT.
- nine_k 9mo ago
  This is not even funny to read, given huge networks like T-Mobile USA being IPv6-only.
  - cyberax 9mo ago
    They are using IPv6 as a fancy transport protocol for IPv4 NAT.
    - nine_k 9mo ago
      No; most sites I reach from the phone seem to be reached via IPv6. E.g. hitting whatismyip.org exposes an IPv6 (though mentions an IPv4 because they're trying to discover that, too). Some sites do not support IPv6; for those indeed there's a XLAT464 service.
      - sgjohnson 9mo ago
        464XLAT is for dealing with IPv4 literal addresses in a v6 only network. Non-literals can be addressed with DNS64 & NAT64
        nine_k 9mo ago
        GitHub only has IPv4 addresses, for instance :-/
    - orangeboats 9mo ago
      By being IPv6-only they are effectively making their users to preferentially connect over native IPv6 though. Personal anecdote, but once you have IPv6 setup properly (meaning your devices prefer IPv6 over IPv4) 70-80% of your internet traffic will be IPv6. The NAT64 is really just there for the holdouts.
      - ectospheno 9mo ago
        I run dual stack at home with dns64/nat64. I average 50/50 traffic v4/v6. Web browsing gets skewed v6 but large file transfers and some streaming pushed it back to 50/50 overall. My family would revolt if I went v6 only so I'm not sure I'd say its just there for holdouts. Major annoyances include any old device and my hue bridge.
- apatheticonion 9mo ago
  AWS charges for ipv4 addresses but ipv6 addresses are free. ipv4 with NAT doesn't supercede ipv6, it just extends its life.
- tjohns 9mo ago
  NAT doesn't solve everything, and creates a whole new class of problems that you can just avoid by adopting IPv6 natively. And it's definitely not being ignored at larger companies. In particular, just off the top of my head... - T-Mobile US doesn't even assign clients an IPv4 address anymore. Their entire network is IPv6 native. - Many cloud providers charge extra for IPv4 addresses, but give IPv6 addresses out for free.
  - reincarnate0x14 9mo ago
    For trivial cases NAT is easy, for complex situations it's a nightmare. I've been fighting a lonely battle against multiple-NAT VPNs as being the solution to the wrong problem for longer than I care to remember, and I'm tired boss. A few years ago we had a client site go offline because a local network guy just didn't like IPv6 and turned it off, not realizing that a huge amount of stuff was happening automatically and that's why he hadn't been needing to work on it.
- lxgr 9mo ago
  Oh no, somebody should warn all the ISPs deploying IPv6-native connections with v4 reachable over some fallback technology (464XLAT, DS-Lite, NAT64 etc.) to their hundreds of millions if not billions of customers! --Sent from my IPv6
  - alt227 9mo ago
    The only ISPs issuing IPv6 only connections are mobile device operators and Telcos. THey are a small subset of ISPs in the world and IPv6 only connections will never gain any traction outside of that world. I agree it will not die so I retract that statement, but it will never fully replace IPv4 in standard wired internet connections.
Spooky23 9mo ago
Tbh it’s is a huge PITA with little practical benefit. IPv6 is the Perl 6 of networking. Many of the big benefits are things that don’t deliver anything that folks are lacking. You also need to understand how you fit in the overall universe more.
- avhception 9mo ago
  I absolutely love the things that IPv6 delivers and employ it on purpose.
  - UqWBcuFx6NV4r 9mo ago
    The world very clearly doesn’t revolve around what HN users “love”.
    - dijit 9mo ago
      I think the western world very much revolves around: * The internet * Linux servers * Automation I get your point, but it falls on deaf ears to me since most people don’t feel the benefits until some passionate nerd makes something that scratches an itch. For a practical example: peer-to-peer sharing like Airdrop is much easier to implement in a world with ipv6.
      - vbezhenar 9mo ago
        > For a practical example: peer-to-peer sharing like Airdrop is much easier to implement in a world with ipv6. And without firewalls. Unfortunately this world does not exist.
      - death916 9mo ago
        According to my last job interview, linux servers are only for websites and worthless otherwise.
    - avhception 9mo ago
      The world at large doesn't care what I love, correct. But my users care about whether they have to remember that they're supposed to use port bla instead of the standard port foo, which is a common scenario with v4. Not enough addresses, and / or you can't get them to the VM or container or VPN client or whatever that needs them. IPv6 can often fix these kinds of issues. Does the world at large care? No. Do I care? Yes. Do my users care? Yes, albeit indirectly. Does my organization care? Yes, in the sense that it removes friction from what it needs the employees to do. And that's all the justification that's needed, I'd say. The world very clearly doesn't need to revolve around what I love for IPv6 to be a good thing.
belter 9mo ago
>> I know someone who graduated from UCI with a CompSci degree with a specialization in networking, just before the COVID19 pandemic began. He recalled that the networking courses he took did not cover IPv6 at all... I am not doubting you, but I feel this story is too hard to believe without adding further nuances... MIT 6.829 teaches IPv6 since 2002: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-829-computer-networks-fall-2002/ https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-829-computer-networks-fall-200... In Portugal and other countries, there are subjects on Computer Science before College or University, and they teach it on High School...
- kortilla 9mo ago
  The issue is that it’s not taught with IPv6 first. Networking courses do all kinds of stuff using IPv4 to demonstrate various protocols on top (e.g. http, tcp, icmp, etc). Then there is usually a chapter on IPv6 that just briefly covers the differences. I.e. the exercises all tend to use IPv4 as the foundation so people don’t practice v6
  - b112 9mo ago
    Well it makes sense, no one uses ipv6 anyhow. Most I know are waiting for ipv8.
  - bc569a80a344f9c 9mo ago
    But TCP or HTTP don’t care about the underlying transport. They’re higher level protocols that are payloads to either IPv4 or IPv6. It’s irrelevant what the transport is when dissecting HTTP and very little time should be spent on it. IPv4 is, for all intents and purposes, still the default transport. It’s also simpler than IPv6 in some regards. When teaching layer 3, it makes sense to teach both, and teach IPv4 first. Though I fully agree that they should be taught with equal emphasis. I don’t doubt there’s a good number of programs out there that don’t into sufficient detail on IPv6.
    - kortilla 9mo ago
      No, this is wrong and it’s why academia is failing. IP addresses show up everywhere when you are working with both TCP and HTTP. Sockaddr is all over sockets programming, IPs show up in HTTP headers, etc. They absolutely care about the underlying protocol because the underlying protocol is how you address the other end.
reincarnate0x14 9mo ago
I've been of the opinion this is one of those "the art advances one funeral at a time." A lot of people are married to IPv4 and its arcane warts and really, really do not want to deal with IPv6 even though most of the core concepts are almost exactly the same thing, except better. I can't imagine anyone who dealt with V4 multicast ever wanting to go back, and I bet they've memory-holed parts of V4 that simply can't be used anymore and so have been turned off for decades(RIP to RIP). Has anyone seen the automated address assignment in V4 ever work? The usual hint it even exists is that if you see one of those addresses it means something is messed up in your Windows host or the DHCP server died. People complain about dual stacks and all that but with a modicum of planning it is minimal extra effort. Anything made in the last decade has V4/V6 support and unless you're messing with low level network code, it's often difficult to even know which way you're being routed. Network devices pretty much all support using groups of names or addresses and not hard coded dotted-quad config statements now, and have for a while. And that was good practice on V4 networks too. Part of it is probably that remembering various V4 magic is easy enough to do but feels complicated enough to be an accomplishment. In V6, there is no point in doing most of that because the protocol has so much more automation of addressing schemes. But if you like those addressing schemes, V6 can do them even better. You can do all sorts of crazy address translation on either the network or host id portion, like giving an internal network a ULA that is magically translated to a public network prefix without any stateful tracking unless that is desirable. I feel there is some analog to DNS in that regard, people who have gotten used to DNS don't give a damn about host IP addresses but some people seem to really like the idea of a fixed address statement. People also seem to be stuck on the idea that NAT creates some kind of security when that's really the stateful tracking that is required for many-to-few translations (thus making firewalls a common place to implement it), not the translation itself. Similar to certificates/pki versus shared keys, yes, one is more upfront effort but that's because it's solving the problem of the Sisyphean task that is the other. edit: This all reminded me that we lived with dual stacks before, in the IP and IPX days, or DECnet, and that GE Ether-whatever, and those had less in common. IPX mostly died with Netware but it had a number of advantages that wouldn't be bolted on top of IP for years, some of which are present in IPv6. I rather liked IPX and had history gone differently that it used 48-bit addressing would be causing us to discuss whether or not EUID was a mistake or not :)
lloeki 9mo ago
Meanwhile, I was taught and practiced IPv6 in 2003-5 in engineering school (France). As of 2024, IPv6 deployment in France was >97% mobile and >98% residential due to not being required for obtaining a 5G radio license (and then v6 simply carried downward to being available on 4G) + every ISP that provides FTTH also providing v6. https://www.arcep.fr/fileadmin/reprise/observatoire/ipv6/Arcep_2025_Barometer_of_the_Transition_to_IPv6.pdf https://www.arcep.fr/fileadmin/reprise/observatoire/ipv6/Arc... Over here IPv6 JustWorks to the point of absolute boredom.
- yrro 9mo ago
  Is it commonly used within small/medium/large businesses?
  - thyristan 9mo ago
    German situation is mostly/rarely/never. Small businesses have their DSL line where their cheapo router will announce an IPv6 prefix which almost all ISPs over here provide. Medium to large businesses usually have some braindead security policies that include switching off all IPv6 functionality in devices.
    - sallveburrpi 9mo ago
      Don’t get me started on security policies of large German (non-tech adjacent) companies - so many of them are still stuck in the 90s
      - lawlessone 9mo ago
        Are they still faxing?
        smithkl42 9mo ago
        I work for an insurtech (!), and something like 90% of our communications with mortgage companies is via fax. I kid you not.
freejazz 9mo ago
Weird, I graduated from RIT in 2009 with a B.S. in Applied Networking and Systems Administration and we covered IPV6 quite a bit
Bluecobra 9mo ago
I recently passed the CCNA again and they really spend a lot more time on IPv6 compared to 15 years ago. It inspired me to go all in this time and configured my home network with a PD allocation from my ISP. I also came up with some fun labs and even got a IPv6 sage T-shirt from Hurricane Electric.
- Avicebron 9mo ago
  Did you have to do anything special to get the t shirt? I got the sage cert ages ago and they never sent my shirt...
  - Bluecobra 9mo ago
    No, but it did arrive several months later. Maybe they wait and send it in batches?
    - Avicebron 9mo ago
      It arrived. Maybe the send them out yearly.
- ar_lan 9mo ago
  Any recommended courses? I'm a SWE and never felt compelled for the CCNA but my intersection with networking-related problems seems to continuously increase and I would like to up my game before getting in over my head at work.
  - Bluecobra 9mo ago
    I just bought the official exam guide found Neil Anderson’s videos helpful. One thing that bugged me a bit was they spent a little too much time on their WiFi, including the obsolete Airie OS.
paulddraper 9mo ago
You have it backwards, education always lags industry adoption. (*Assuming it's a software engineering-focused curriculum.) Programs will teach Docker only years after it is adopted. Same with AWS, JavaScript, etc. If it’s not adopted by industry, it won’t be taught about in schools.
mulmen 9mo ago
This doesn’t hold up. Schools can’t teach everything, especially in a field where innovation happens in the workplace, not the classroom. Should I have learned about LLMs when I was an undergraduate 20 years ago? This is just further proof that university educations are still not job training. The sooner we disabuse ourselves of that perception the better off society will be. Higher education is about creating a breadth of knowledge, not specific marketable skills. CompSci is a research field, not job training. If your friend wanted to learn specific job skills a technical college would be the appropriate setting. I realize this misperception is perpetuated by the job market but I’m still not surprised at the education provided by UCI and don’t fault them for providing it.
morshu9001 9mo ago
They taught us, they also taught ipv4 in the old "separate address per host" way instead of jumping to NAT, but I think ipv6 is inherently more complicated than ipv4 for the average use case. It's not just a thinking shift. Separate from that, deliberate decisions were made to make it a "clean slate" without consideration for existing ipv4 hosts. Guess they were hoping the separate stacks would go away eventually, but in hindsight, no way.
- cylemons 9mo ago
  ipv6 would have been a breaking change anyway, just take the opportunity to push through any changes that they want to make
- goku12 9mo ago
  > ... but I think ipv6 is inherently more complicated than ipv4 for the average use case. It's not just a thinking shift. IPv6 isn't all that complicated for most common use cases. Its fundamental concepts and rules are simple. It also obviates the necessity of the complicated workaround called NAT, without which IPv4 is impractical these days. It's more like the imperial vs metric system debate. If the world hadn't seen IPv4, I believe that we'd all be using IPv6 without any complaints. The real problem is that IPv6 isn't taught well. > Separate from that, deliberate decisions were made to make it a "clean slate" without consideration for existing ipv4 hosts. Guess they were hoping the separate stacks would go away eventually, but in hindsight, no way. I'm not sure what to make of this. The presence of the IPv4 stack isn't what blocks the adoption of IPv6 - at least not technically. They can coexist on the same host and function concurrently without interfering with each other. It was designed to operate like that. The actual blocker is the attitude that people hold towards IPv6 - "We have IPv4 that works already. Why should we care about an alternative?". You can see that expressed on this discussion thread itself. There is one crucial detail that the IPv6 detractors neglect - the scarcity of IPv4 addresses means that IPv4 address blocks are now heavily coveted and therefore subject to moneyed interests. That isn't very good for the health of the open internet, digital rights and equity. They're thinking about individual trees and losing sight of the whole damn forest. IPv6 isn't a solution looking for a problem. It's the solution for a problem that people simply ignore.
wolvoleo 9mo ago
I got taught IPv6 in 1995. At that time they said it was super important because it would replace IPv4 within a year lolololol
nikanj 9mo ago
Helsinki CS masters had ipv6 20 years ago, but nobody listened at the lectures because all of our home LANs ran ipv4
shermantanktop 9mo ago
I can’t think of any technology where mass adoption was driven by knowledge forcibly inserted into students’ brains by schools… if anything, adoption comes when people realize their out-of-touch curriculum is no longer relevant. To be clear, degree programs have value, but it’s not in future-proofing students against needing to learn things after they leave school. Ideally it should prepare them and encourage them to do so.
easterncalculus 9mo ago
I certainly can validate this anecdote, I also had to learn almost everything about IPv6 myself.
djha-skin 9mo ago
80% of my career knowledge as a devops engineer, systems administrator, and IT engineer has been on the job training. That's just how it works. The real reason is IT people hate ipv6. They want NAT. They don't want all the security holes and extra complexity. I don't want having to work with a network stack that is poorly supported by some switches and routers.
theturtlemoves 9mo ago
> Everything he learned about IPv6, he had to learn on his own or on the job. Replace "IPv6" in that sentence with any practical knowledge or skill and it's probably true for my entire master's degree....

alt227 9mo ago

IPv6 was superceded by NAT a long time ago. It will die a slw and quiet death which is why it is now being ignored by training facilities and experts worldwide.

MBCook 9mo ago
It was? Isn’t it what all the cell phones networks use these days? And most ISP’s? They may hand the end user device a IPv4 address but don’t they actually use IPv6?
- alt227 9mo ago
  Yes as I said in a sibling post the telcos are the only ones using it, and that is the only reason that graphs like the google client one exist. That is only because it already exists and is cheaper than using NAT when you have hundreds of millions of clients. IPv6 only ISPs will never leave the mobile space.
  - kstrauser 9mo ago
    “The largest ISPs are the only ones using it” is another way of describing it as ubiquitous.
    - alt227 9mo ago
      I disagree. If they were the largest ISPs then adoption would already be over 50% instead of stalling below it. I would say its more "Wireless only ISPs are the only ones using it"
      - kstrauser 9mo ago
        > I would say its more "Wireless only ISPs are the only ones using it" So… the largest ISPs. Recent number show about 94% of Americans have cell phones and 92% of American households have Internet connections. In raw numbers, that’s about 300M cell phones and 111M households. If zero fixed ISPs support IPv6, that’d still be about 75% of total Internet connections that do.
        alt227 9mo ago
        > So… the largest ISPs. Yep, a few gatekeepers of a single device space. Your numbers are wrong, seee the google graph everybody is pointing to: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
      - patmorgan23 9mo ago
        Name a large isp not using V6
        alt227 9mo ago
        They are all using IPv6. Name one which has stopped using IPv4.
        kstrauser 9mo ago
        Goalposts -> thataway.
  - lxgr 9mo ago
    Maybe in the US. I've seen IPv6-only connections via DS-Lite in more than one other country on wired home ISPs.
patrickmcnamara 9mo ago
https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
- alt227 9mo ago
  People love this graph and regularly tout it as if it explains full internet usage. Especially when they dont bother to add any explanation or comment alongside it. This graph is mainly due to the fact that telcos use IPv6 for mobile devices, nothing more. Over time you will see that graph flatline and peter out as mobile device uage reaches critical mass.
  - lazide 9mo ago
    Every major ISP in the US, India, and most of the rest of Asia that I’ve seen is handing out and using IPv6 now too. Hell, chances are if you got a new router (like any new client) for your ISP, you’d be on v6 too.
    - alt227 9mo ago
      Yep, and even with all those countries with their billions of mobile devices IPv6 use still hasnt even reached 50%. Pretty much all ISPs hand out both IPv6 and IPv4 addresses to their clients, this is nothing new. When they start only issueing IPv6 IPs is when it would start truly taking off, but it will never get to that point and it will never happen.
      - lazide 9mo ago
        Looks like it’s right at 50% and rapidly increasing. [https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html] What exactly are you going on about? 5-10 years for the old devices to be EOL’d, and we’ll likely be at 95%.
        nine_k 9mo ago
DrewADesign 9mo ago
Digital Ocean didn’t even have an ipv6 address on by default in the droplet I created last week. It’s just a switch to flip, but I’ll bet the support costs of hobbyists/enthusiasts not realizing they needed to also write firewall rules, make sure ports weren’t open for databases and things like that for ipv6.
- PaulHoule 9mo ago
  It's a "just doesn't work" experience every time that I try it and I don't experience any value from it, it's not like there isn't anything I can connect to on IPv6 that I can't connect to on IPv4. My ISP has finally mastered providing me with reliable albeit slow DSL. Fiber would change my life, there just isn't any point in asking for IPv6. Also note those bloated packets are death for many modern applications like VoIP.
  - Spooky23 9mo ago
    Exactly. Spectrum delivers good IPv6 service in my area. I tried it when I upgraded my gateway. All of my devices are assigned 4 IPv6 IPs, hostnames are replaced by auto assigned stuff from the ISP, and lots of random things don’t work. I went from being pumped to learn more to realizing I’m going to invest a lot of time and I could not identify and tangible benefit.
    - tjohns 9mo ago
      The biggest tangible benefit is you don't need to worry about NAT port mapping any more. Every device can have a public address, and you can have multiple servers exposing services on the same port without a conflict. (The flip side is having a network-level firewall is more important than ever.) You also don't have to worry about running a DHCP server anymore, at least on small networks. The simplicity of SLAAC is a breath of fresh air, and removes DHCP as a single point of failure for a network.
      - whatevaa 9mo ago
        Few people care about exposing a server in the first place, even fewer care about multiple servers on a single port.
anon7000 9mo ago
What are you even basing that on? Here are some facts: - You have to pay money to get a static IPv4 address for cloud machines on eg AWS. Anything needing a static IPv4 will cost more and more as demand increases. NAT doesn’t exactly fix that. - Mainstream IoT protocols have a hard dependency on IPv6 (eg Matter/Thread). Not to mention plenty of 5g deployments. - Many modern networks quietly use IPv6 internally. I mean routing is simpler without NAT. So it almost definitely won’t die. It’s more likely it’ll slowly and quietly continue growing behind the scenes, even if consumers are still seeing IPv4 on their home networks.
- cyberax 9mo ago
  Matter/Thread use private IPv6 addresses so it's just an implementation detail. Nobody is exposing light switches to the public Internet.
- hdgvhicv 9mo ago
  IPv4 addresses have been dropping in price for a few years and are cheaper in real terms than at my point in the last 15
  - throw0101a 9mo ago
    > IPv4 addresses have been dropping in price for a few years and are cheaper in real terms than at my point in the last 15 More IPv6 deployments may (ironically?) help reduce IPv4 prices as you can get IPv6 'for free' and have Internet connectivity (and not have to worry about exhaustion in any practical way). Doing CG-NAT could reduce the number IPv4 addresses you need to acquire.
    - hdgvhicv 9mo ago
      IPv4 addresses are basically free - indeed they are a profit centre. At $20 an address that’s $2 a year at most (10% ROI) where many charge 20 times that ($5/month isn’t unheard of)
- wolvoleo 9mo ago
  NAT fixes it in the sense that blocks become available when providers switch to CGNAT.
nine_k 9mo ago
This is not even funny to read, given huge networks like T-Mobile USA being IPv6-only.
- cyberax 9mo ago
  They are using IPv6 as a fancy transport protocol for IPv4 NAT.
  - nine_k 9mo ago
    No; most sites I reach from the phone seem to be reached via IPv6. E.g. hitting whatismyip.org exposes an IPv6 (though mentions an IPv4 because they're trying to discover that, too). Some sites do not support IPv6; for those indeed there's a XLAT464 service.
    - sgjohnson 9mo ago
      464XLAT is for dealing with IPv4 literal addresses in a v6 only network. Non-literals can be addressed with DNS64 & NAT64
      - nine_k 9mo ago
        GitHub only has IPv4 addresses, for instance :-/
  - orangeboats 9mo ago
    By being IPv6-only they are effectively making their users to preferentially connect over native IPv6 though. Personal anecdote, but once you have IPv6 setup properly (meaning your devices prefer IPv6 over IPv4) 70-80% of your internet traffic will be IPv6. The NAT64 is really just there for the holdouts.
    - ectospheno 9mo ago
      I run dual stack at home with dns64/nat64. I average 50/50 traffic v4/v6. Web browsing gets skewed v6 but large file transfers and some streaming pushed it back to 50/50 overall. My family would revolt if I went v6 only so I'm not sure I'd say its just there for holdouts. Major annoyances include any old device and my hue bridge.
apatheticonion 9mo ago
AWS charges for ipv4 addresses but ipv6 addresses are free. ipv4 with NAT doesn't supercede ipv6, it just extends its life.
tjohns 9mo ago
NAT doesn't solve everything, and creates a whole new class of problems that you can just avoid by adopting IPv6 natively. And it's definitely not being ignored at larger companies. In particular, just off the top of my head... - T-Mobile US doesn't even assign clients an IPv4 address anymore. Their entire network is IPv6 native. - Many cloud providers charge extra for IPv4 addresses, but give IPv6 addresses out for free.
- reincarnate0x14 9mo ago
  For trivial cases NAT is easy, for complex situations it's a nightmare. I've been fighting a lonely battle against multiple-NAT VPNs as being the solution to the wrong problem for longer than I care to remember, and I'm tired boss. A few years ago we had a client site go offline because a local network guy just didn't like IPv6 and turned it off, not realizing that a huge amount of stuff was happening automatically and that's why he hadn't been needing to work on it.
lxgr 9mo ago
Oh no, somebody should warn all the ISPs deploying IPv6-native connections with v4 reachable over some fallback technology (464XLAT, DS-Lite, NAT64 etc.) to their hundreds of millions if not billions of customers! --Sent from my IPv6
- alt227 9mo ago
  The only ISPs issuing IPv6 only connections are mobile device operators and Telcos. THey are a small subset of ISPs in the world and IPv6 only connections will never gain any traction outside of that world. I agree it will not die so I retract that statement, but it will never fully replace IPv4 in standard wired internet connections.

Spooky23 9mo ago

Tbh it’s is a huge PITA with little practical benefit. IPv6 is the Perl 6 of networking. Many of the big benefits are things that don’t deliver anything that folks are lacking. You also need to understand how you fit in the overall universe more.

avhception 9mo ago
I absolutely love the things that IPv6 delivers and employ it on purpose.
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 9mo ago
  The world very clearly doesn’t revolve around what HN users “love”.
  - dijit 9mo ago
    I think the western world very much revolves around: * The internet * Linux servers * Automation I get your point, but it falls on deaf ears to me since most people don’t feel the benefits until some passionate nerd makes something that scratches an itch. For a practical example: peer-to-peer sharing like Airdrop is much easier to implement in a world with ipv6.
    - vbezhenar 9mo ago
      > For a practical example: peer-to-peer sharing like Airdrop is much easier to implement in a world with ipv6. And without firewalls. Unfortunately this world does not exist.
    - death916 9mo ago
      According to my last job interview, linux servers are only for websites and worthless otherwise.
  - avhception 9mo ago
    The world at large doesn't care what I love, correct. But my users care about whether they have to remember that they're supposed to use port bla instead of the standard port foo, which is a common scenario with v4. Not enough addresses, and / or you can't get them to the VM or container or VPN client or whatever that needs them. IPv6 can often fix these kinds of issues. Does the world at large care? No. Do I care? Yes. Do my users care? Yes, albeit indirectly. Does my organization care? Yes, in the sense that it removes friction from what it needs the employees to do. And that's all the justification that's needed, I'd say. The world very clearly doesn't need to revolve around what I love for IPv6 to be a good thing.

belter 9mo ago

>> I know someone who graduated from UCI with a CompSci degree with a specialization in networking, just before the COVID19 pandemic began. He recalled that the networking courses he took did not cover IPv6 at all... I am not doubting you, but I feel this story is too hard to believe without adding further nuances... MIT 6.829 teaches IPv6 since 2002: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-829-computer-networks-fall-2002/ https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-829-computer-networks-fall-200... In Portugal and other countries, there are subjects on Computer Science before College or University, and they teach it on High School...

kortilla 9mo ago
The issue is that it’s not taught with IPv6 first. Networking courses do all kinds of stuff using IPv4 to demonstrate various protocols on top (e.g. http, tcp, icmp, etc). Then there is usually a chapter on IPv6 that just briefly covers the differences. I.e. the exercises all tend to use IPv4 as the foundation so people don’t practice v6
- b112 9mo ago
  Well it makes sense, no one uses ipv6 anyhow. Most I know are waiting for ipv8.
- bc569a80a344f9c 9mo ago
  But TCP or HTTP don’t care about the underlying transport. They’re higher level protocols that are payloads to either IPv4 or IPv6. It’s irrelevant what the transport is when dissecting HTTP and very little time should be spent on it. IPv4 is, for all intents and purposes, still the default transport. It’s also simpler than IPv6 in some regards. When teaching layer 3, it makes sense to teach both, and teach IPv4 first. Though I fully agree that they should be taught with equal emphasis. I don’t doubt there’s a good number of programs out there that don’t into sufficient detail on IPv6.
  - kortilla 9mo ago
    No, this is wrong and it’s why academia is failing. IP addresses show up everywhere when you are working with both TCP and HTTP. Sockaddr is all over sockets programming, IPs show up in HTTP headers, etc. They absolutely care about the underlying protocol because the underlying protocol is how you address the other end.

reincarnate0x14 9mo ago

I've been of the opinion this is one of those "the art advances one funeral at a time." A lot of people are married to IPv4 and its arcane warts and really, really do not want to deal with IPv6 even though most of the core concepts are almost exactly the same thing, except better. I can't imagine anyone who dealt with V4 multicast ever wanting to go back, and I bet they've memory-holed parts of V4 that simply can't be used anymore and so have been turned off for decades(RIP to RIP). Has anyone seen the automated address assignment in V4 ever work? The usual hint it even exists is that if you see one of those addresses it means something is messed up in your Windows host or the DHCP server died. People complain about dual stacks and all that but with a modicum of planning it is minimal extra effort. Anything made in the last decade has V4/V6 support and unless you're messing with low level network code, it's often difficult to even know which way you're being routed. Network devices pretty much all support using groups of names or addresses and not hard coded dotted-quad config statements now, and have for a while. And that was good practice on V4 networks too. Part of it is probably that remembering various V4 magic is easy enough to do but feels complicated enough to be an accomplishment. In V6, there is no point in doing most of that because the protocol has so much more automation of addressing schemes. But if you like those addressing schemes, V6 can do them even better. You can do all sorts of crazy address translation on either the network or host id portion, like giving an internal network a ULA that is magically translated to a public network prefix without any stateful tracking unless that is desirable. I feel there is some analog to DNS in that regard, people who have gotten used to DNS don't give a damn about host IP addresses but some people seem to really like the idea of a fixed address statement. People also seem to be stuck on the idea that NAT creates some kind of security when that's really the stateful tracking that is required for many-to-few translations (thus making firewalls a common place to implement it), not the translation itself. Similar to certificates/pki versus shared keys, yes, one is more upfront effort but that's because it's solving the problem of the Sisyphean task that is the other. edit: This all reminded me that we lived with dual stacks before, in the IP and IPX days, or DECnet, and that GE Ether-whatever, and those had less in common. IPX mostly died with Netware but it had a number of advantages that wouldn't be bolted on top of IP for years, some of which are present in IPv6. I rather liked IPX and had history gone differently that it used 48-bit addressing would be causing us to discuss whether or not EUID was a mistake or not :)

lloeki 9mo ago

Meanwhile, I was taught and practiced IPv6 in 2003-5 in engineering school (France). As of 2024, IPv6 deployment in France was >97% mobile and >98% residential due to not being required for obtaining a 5G radio license (and then v6 simply carried downward to being available on 4G) + every ISP that provides FTTH also providing v6. https://www.arcep.fr/fileadmin/reprise/observatoire/ipv6/Arcep_2025_Barometer_of_the_Transition_to_IPv6.pdf https://www.arcep.fr/fileadmin/reprise/observatoire/ipv6/Arc... Over here IPv6 JustWorks to the point of absolute boredom.

yrro 9mo ago
Is it commonly used within small/medium/large businesses?
- thyristan 9mo ago
  German situation is mostly/rarely/never. Small businesses have their DSL line where their cheapo router will announce an IPv6 prefix which almost all ISPs over here provide. Medium to large businesses usually have some braindead security policies that include switching off all IPv6 functionality in devices.
  - sallveburrpi 9mo ago
    Don’t get me started on security policies of large German (non-tech adjacent) companies - so many of them are still stuck in the 90s
    - lawlessone 9mo ago
      Are they still faxing?
      - smithkl42 9mo ago
        I work for an insurtech (!), and something like 90% of our communications with mortgage companies is via fax. I kid you not.

freejazz 9mo ago

Weird, I graduated from RIT in 2009 with a B.S. in Applied Networking and Systems Administration and we covered IPV6 quite a bit

Bluecobra 9mo ago

I recently passed the CCNA again and they really spend a lot more time on IPv6 compared to 15 years ago. It inspired me to go all in this time and configured my home network with a PD allocation from my ISP. I also came up with some fun labs and even got a IPv6 sage T-shirt from Hurricane Electric.

Avicebron 9mo ago
Did you have to do anything special to get the t shirt? I got the sage cert ages ago and they never sent my shirt...
- Bluecobra 9mo ago
  No, but it did arrive several months later. Maybe they wait and send it in batches?
  - Avicebron 9mo ago
    It arrived. Maybe the send them out yearly.
ar_lan 9mo ago
Any recommended courses? I'm a SWE and never felt compelled for the CCNA but my intersection with networking-related problems seems to continuously increase and I would like to up my game before getting in over my head at work.
- Bluecobra 9mo ago
  I just bought the official exam guide found Neil Anderson’s videos helpful. One thing that bugged me a bit was they spent a little too much time on their WiFi, including the obsolete Airie OS.

paulddraper 9mo ago

You have it backwards, education always lags industry adoption. (*Assuming it's a software engineering-focused curriculum.) Programs will teach Docker only years after it is adopted. Same with AWS, JavaScript, etc. If it’s not adopted by industry, it won’t be taught about in schools.

mulmen 9mo ago

This doesn’t hold up. Schools can’t teach everything, especially in a field where innovation happens in the workplace, not the classroom. Should I have learned about LLMs when I was an undergraduate 20 years ago? This is just further proof that university educations are still not job training. The sooner we disabuse ourselves of that perception the better off society will be. Higher education is about creating a breadth of knowledge, not specific marketable skills. CompSci is a research field, not job training. If your friend wanted to learn specific job skills a technical college would be the appropriate setting. I realize this misperception is perpetuated by the job market but I’m still not surprised at the education provided by UCI and don’t fault them for providing it.

morshu9001 9mo ago

They taught us, they also taught ipv4 in the old "separate address per host" way instead of jumping to NAT, but I think ipv6 is inherently more complicated than ipv4 for the average use case. It's not just a thinking shift. Separate from that, deliberate decisions were made to make it a "clean slate" without consideration for existing ipv4 hosts. Guess they were hoping the separate stacks would go away eventually, but in hindsight, no way.

cylemons 9mo ago
ipv6 would have been a breaking change anyway, just take the opportunity to push through any changes that they want to make
goku12 9mo ago
> ... but I think ipv6 is inherently more complicated than ipv4 for the average use case. It's not just a thinking shift. IPv6 isn't all that complicated for most common use cases. Its fundamental concepts and rules are simple. It also obviates the necessity of the complicated workaround called NAT, without which IPv4 is impractical these days. It's more like the imperial vs metric system debate. If the world hadn't seen IPv4, I believe that we'd all be using IPv6 without any complaints. The real problem is that IPv6 isn't taught well. > Separate from that, deliberate decisions were made to make it a "clean slate" without consideration for existing ipv4 hosts. Guess they were hoping the separate stacks would go away eventually, but in hindsight, no way. I'm not sure what to make of this. The presence of the IPv4 stack isn't what blocks the adoption of IPv6 - at least not technically. They can coexist on the same host and function concurrently without interfering with each other. It was designed to operate like that. The actual blocker is the attitude that people hold towards IPv6 - "We have IPv4 that works already. Why should we care about an alternative?". You can see that expressed on this discussion thread itself. There is one crucial detail that the IPv6 detractors neglect - the scarcity of IPv4 addresses means that IPv4 address blocks are now heavily coveted and therefore subject to moneyed interests. That isn't very good for the health of the open internet, digital rights and equity. They're thinking about individual trees and losing sight of the whole damn forest. IPv6 isn't a solution looking for a problem. It's the solution for a problem that people simply ignore.

wolvoleo 9mo ago

I got taught IPv6 in 1995. At that time they said it was super important because it would replace IPv4 within a year lolololol

nikanj 9mo ago

Helsinki CS masters had ipv6 20 years ago, but nobody listened at the lectures because all of our home LANs ran ipv4

shermantanktop 9mo ago

I can’t think of any technology where mass adoption was driven by knowledge forcibly inserted into students’ brains by schools… if anything, adoption comes when people realize their out-of-touch curriculum is no longer relevant. To be clear, degree programs have value, but it’s not in future-proofing students against needing to learn things after they leave school. Ideally it should prepare them and encourage them to do so.

easterncalculus 9mo ago

I certainly can validate this anecdote, I also had to learn almost everything about IPv6 myself.

djha-skin 9mo ago

80% of my career knowledge as a devops engineer, systems administrator, and IT engineer has been on the job training. That's just how it works. The real reason is IT people hate ipv6. They want NAT. They don't want all the security holes and extra complexity. I don't want having to work with a network stack that is poorly supported by some switches and routers.

theturtlemoves 9mo ago

> Everything he learned about IPv6, he had to learn on his own or on the job. Replace "IPv6" in that sentence with any practical knowledge or skill and it's probably true for my entire master's degree....