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It has barely hit 50% and it's already plateauing. This adoption rate is ridiculous despite basically all network interfaces supporting it. I thought I would se
by usui 6mo ago
It has barely hit 50% and it's already plateauing. This adoption rate is ridiculous despite basically all network interfaces supporting it. I thought I would see IPv6 take over in my lifetime as the default for platforms to build on but I can see I was wrong. Enterprise and commercial companies are literally going to hold back internet progress around 60 to 75 years because it's in their best interest to ensure users can't host services without them. Maybe even 75 years might be too optimistic? They are literally going to do everything in their power to avoid the transition, either being dragged out kicking and screaming or throwing their hands up and saying they can't support IPv6 because it costs too much.
Try going IPv6-only by disabling IPv4 on your computer as a test and notice that almost nothing works except Google. End users shouldn't need to set up NAT64/6to4 tunneling. It should be ISPs doing that to prepare for the transition.
Also, notice how Android and iOS don't support turning off IPv4.
- imoverclocked 6mo agoISPs often fail to do this because there is always someone in the hierarchy who says, "nobody is demanding it."
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- FridgeSeal 6mo agoI worked at a place where they refused to run it _anywhere_ because a couple of people were insistent that it was “insecure”.
- Galanwe 6mo ago... and they were right. v6 adoption is often an all or nothing, because if you run both stacks, you have to ensure they are consistent. While you can reasonably do it on your home LAN, doing it across an entire infrastructure is the worst. Now you have to make sure all your subnets, routing, VLANs, firewall rules, etc work exactly the same in two protocols that have very little in common. It is the equivalent of shipping two programs in different languages and maintaining exact feature parity between both at all times.
- kstrauser 6mo agoI genuinely don’t understand this. The concepts are nearly identical between the two.
- Galanwe 6mo agoHum no, to me they are orthogonal. v4 was built around the idea of multiple free standing networks linked by gateways. v6 was built around the idea of a universal network. I dont care about what your LAN adress space look like when I'm in my LAN, because we are not in the same v4 network. I am sovereign in my network. With v6, everyone is effectively in the same network. I have to ask my ISP for a prefix that he will rent me for money even for my LAN. If I want some freedom from said ISP prefix, I am mercifully granted the honor of managing ULA/NAT66 (granted I paid for a fancy router). Also if I want any kind of privacy, I will have to manage privacy extensions and the great invention of having to use automatically generated, dynamically routed, essentially multiple random IPs per interface. How lucky am I to use such a great new technology. Seriously v6 was created by nerds in a lab with no practical experience of what people wanted.
- kstrauser 6mo agov4 and v6 were build around the exact same use cases. > With v6, everyone is effectively in the same network. Just like IPv4. > I have to ask my ISP for a prefix that he will rent me for money even for my LAN. Just like IPv4, if you need a static address. > If I want some freedom from said ISP prefix, I am mercifully granted the honor of managing ULA/NAT66 (granted I paid for a fancy router). Compared with IPv4, where if you want some freedom from said ISP subnet, you are mercifully granted the honor of managing RFC-1918 addresses/NAT (granted you paid for a router that doesn't screw it up). > Also if I want any kind of privacy, I will have to manage privacy extensions ...which are enabled by default nearly universally > and the great invention of having to use automatically generated, dynamically routed, essentially multiple random IPs per interface. Make up your mind. Are rotating, privacy-preserving addresses good or bad? The way it works in real life, not in the strawman version, is that you (automatically!) use the random addresses for outgoing connections and the fixed addresses for incoming.
- bluGill 6mo agoI with I knew how to get through that I want it. I'm supposed to be a tech guy - that means I need experience with the latest tech in my house
- moduspol 6mo agoI switched my home ISP from cable (which supported IPv6) to fiber (which doesn't) and I've had a nagging disappointment ever since. But I guess consumers aren't really demanding it enough.
- betaby 6mo agoNobody is demanding IPv4 either. Or Ethernet. People buy "Wi-Fi", literally "Wi-Fi", not Internet access.
- vel0city 6mo agoIt has been interesting to me to see how the usage of "my wifi bill" instead of "my internet bill" has shifted.
- kentm 6mo agoExactly. To this point I went to a Comcast store to cancel my internet and the person asked me if I meant I wanted to cancel my “Wi-Fi”. I was very confused for a couple seconds.
- throw0101d 6mo ago> ISPs often fail to do this because there is always someone in the hierarchy who says, "nobody is demanding it." I'm with an ISP whose landline/fibre division does not have IPv6, but whose mobile division gives IPv6 to handsets.
- themafia 6mo agoComcast, one of the largest residential ISPs in the USA, has almost full IPv6 deployment by default. The majority Verizon Wireless is IPv6 by default. Residential customers in the USA have great access if they just enable the stack. There is nothing about IPv6 that prevents ISPs from filtering ports for all customers. They almost all actively filter at least port 25, 139 and 445 regardless of the actual transport. So I'm not sure "blocking service hosting" is the actual goal here. The problem seems to be that all of the large and wealthy nations of the world have made the necessary huge investments into IPv6 while many of their smaller neighbors and outlying countries and islands have struggled to get any appreciable deployment. It should be a UN and IMF priority to get IPv6 networks deployed in the rest of the world so we can finally start thinking about a global cutover.
- dtech 6mo agoIn many developing countries IPv6 adoption is far and sometimes networks are IPv6-only, because IPv4 is expensive and they have relatively little addresses compared to users... You can see southeast Asia is pretty green on the map of the post.
- kortilla 6mo agoA UN priority!? They have real issues they should be dealing with like the life and death of millions of people
- themafia 6mo agoI think it's fine if they have more than one priority.
- realityking 6mo agoTo be fair to the grand parent, the International Telecommunications Union is a specialized agency of the UN and actively promoting IPv6: https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/ipv6/Pages/default.aspx https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/ipv6/Pages/default.aspx
- zokier 6mo ago> End users shouldn't need to set up 6to4 tunneling. It should be ISPs doing that to prepare for the transition. Which is what ISP are doing with 464XLAT deployments. IPv6-mostly networking and IPv4-as-a-service are things that are happening in real world right now.
- kalleboo 6mo agoYeah in Japan my ISP even lets me choose which IPv4 provider I want to use, as the fiber network is IPv6-native and IPv4 is "just another service" like IPTV.
- lxgr 6mo agoWow, that’s very cool! Do you know how that works? Do they just connect you to a NAT64 gateway of your choice?
- kalleboo 6mo agoIPv4 is provided using DS-Lite or MAP-E depending on the provider. I'm using OpenWRT and paid for a static IP so I had to manually configure all the details for the MAP-E tunnel in OpenWRT myself, I think typically the routers sold to consumers pick up the configuration automatically somehow.
- usui 6mo agoWhich provider are you using? I'm curious about this since there are not many OpenWrt guides for getting connected in Japan. Is your config similar to this write-up? https://github.com/fakemanhk/openwrt-jp-ipoe https://github.com/fakemanhk/openwrt-jp-ipoe I didn't need to do any configuration for DS-Lite or MAP-E, as DHCPv6 with a configured prefix got IPv6 working, although DNS is still broken when turning off IPv4 entirely.
- kalleboo 6mo agoI'm using en hikari on Flets Cross (10 gigabit) with v6plus. I set it up like 2 years ago but this was in my bookmarks: https://zenn.dev/ebi68k/articles/6df7cfec64c281 https://zenn.dev/ebi68k/articles/6df7cfec64c281 edit: looking this all up again to refresh my memory, it looks like with my static IP the provider switches from using their default MAP-E to using RFC2473 directly instead, the configuration matches "IPIP" in this guide https://qiita.com/kouhei-ioroi/items/cf0c6228c5c1faef415a https://qiita.com/kouhei-ioroi/items/cf0c6228c5c1faef415a
- preisschild 6mo ago> It should be ISPs doing that to prepare for the transition. Yeah, I dont get why more ISPs don't offer carrier-grade NAT64 instead of the typical CGNAT
- lmm 6mo agoIn parts of the world with fewer IP addresses they already are. My ISP _only_ offers MAP-E access to the IPv4 internet for anyone not grandfathered into an older plan.
- ianburrell 6mo agoNAT64 doesn't make sense for consumers. There are too many apps that hardcoded IPv4 in their code. People are going to complain that their old Xbox games don't work. For most people, dual stack works fine. For mobile, the solution is 464XLAT that translates locally. There is MAP-E that does translation on gateway with IPv4 on local network. For businesses, NAT64 makes more sense cause they can control what software is running. Even there, usually have to make IPv4 subnet for the old printers.
- preisschild 6mo ago> There are too many apps that hardcoded IPv4 in their code That would work over CLAT, which most operating systems support. Steam has this issue, clat works around it while still using a ipv6-only net. https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/3372#issuecomment-3728130303 https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/3372...
- keeperofdakeys 6mo agoNearly all ISPs these days are deploying IPv6 for their mobile networks and core service networks, especially in less developed markets^1. The reason is simple, a cost justification. What doesn't exist is a cost justification for Enterprises to deploy IPv6, and for ISPs to deploy Residential / Corporate Internet IPv6. IMO with the right market conditions, IPv6 could spread really fast within 6-24 months. For example, most cloud providers are now charging for IPv4 addresses when IPv6 is free. Small changes like that push in the right direction. ^1 https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/04/asia_in_brief/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/04/asia_in_brief/
- reddalo 6mo agoHetzner makes you pay 1 € per IPv4, while IPv6 is free. I'd gladly get rid of all IPv4's given that I have many servers.
- saltyoldman 6mo agoI don't even know why clouds offer public IP addresses. In my opinion all clouds should only have a gateway that routes via host header for millions of customers. IPv4 should be a special priv for special situations at a higher price. Then these clouds could own maybe 20 IPs total instead of millions.
- seabrookmx 6mo ago> host header Not all workloads are HTTP. > gateway .. for millions of customers That's basically what an AWS ALB is. It's not provisioning bespoke infrastructure when you create it.. it's just a routing rule in their shared infra. If Amazon wanted, they could easily have shared IP's but the cost of an IPv4 isn't so great that this approach has been warranted yet, clearly.
- saltyoldman 6mo agoYeah I get all that, but the only two connection types that are useful are http/s/ and ssh. SSH can have work-arounds like the way google does. Let's let the people that want non http workloads pay more.
- stackghost 6mo agoIs there a reason why adoption has been so abysmally slow? Like surely all the big players have updated their networking equipment by now, and surely every piece of enterprise-grade kit sold in the last 20 years has supported v6. The only arguments I've ever heard against ipv6 that made any sense are that: 1: it's hard to remember addresses, which is mayyyyybe valid for homelab enthusiast types, but for medium scale and up you ought to have a service that hands out per-machine hostnames, so the v6 address becomes merely an implementation detail that you can more or less ignore unless you're grepping logs. I have this on my home network with a whopping 15 devices, and it's easy. and 2: with v6 you can't rely on NAT as an ersatz firewall because suddenly your printer that used to be fat dumb and happy listening on 192.168.1.42 is now accidentally globally-routable and North Korean haxors are printing black and white Kim Il Sung propaganda in your home office and using up all your toner. And while this example was clearly in jest there's a nugget of truth that if your IOT devices don't have globally-routable addresses they're a bit harder to attack, even though NAT isn't a substitute for a proper firewall. But both of these are really only valid for DIY homelab enthusiast types. I honestly have no idea why other people resist ipv6.
- nubinetwork 6mo ago> Like surely all the big players have updated their networking equipment by now My home isp can't even do symmetrical gigabit, let alone ipv6...
- esseph 6mo agoThat's extremely common unless on "active" fiber (vs GPON, DOCSIS3, DSL, most fixed wireless, satellite, mobile, etc.) Your wifi isn't symmetrical either.
- Hikikomori 6mo agoThose are designed to have static asymmetrical bandwidth though, *dm split gives ISP side more of possible shared bandwidth. Wifi bandwidth is shared and dynamic so client can use all of it.
- waynesonfire 6mo ago> It has barely hit 50% and it's already plateauing. That makes sense. The majority of IPv6 deployment is mobile. The next wave of adoption requires ISPs start offering residential IPv6. Once this happens, router manufacturers will innovate around the IPv6 offering as a differentiator, making it easy to deploy by end-users. IPv6 wifi APs will then become ubiqutious and so forth across other services. Has to start with ISPs.
- dtech 6mo agoISPs in the US and Europe mostly have been offering IPv6 for a while now
- Hikikomori 6mo agoOther than France or Germany its far from mostly.
- jabl 6mo agoUnfortunately my ISP here in Europe is not one of those offering IPv6.
- yxhuvud 6mo agoMine does and it works so well that I actually have to turn it off when working from home as a bunch of the third party servers at work doesn't have any support for it.
- lxgr 6mo agoThat sounds more like broken support then. Not having any support at all (i.e. A records or v4 literals only) should just send you to whatever v4 transition technology your ISP offers, no?
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- dtech 6mo agoApple/iOS is probably one of the biggest individual drivers of IPv6 adoption. They've been requiring that iOS apps work on IPv6-only networks for close to 10 years now
- aniviacat 6mo agoIf that's the case, how does the Github app work on iOS?
- dtech 6mo agoNat64: https://developer.apple.com/support/ipv6/ https://developer.apple.com/support/ipv6/
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- eptcyka 6mo agoDifferential enforcement.
- fogllgldl 6mo agoApple’s App Store enforcement is very arbitrary. For example, if the app developer offends steve jobs, you’re banned for life.
- falsemyrmidon 6mo ago[dead]
- nothrabannosir 6mo agoI’m guessing the app works but their prod servers don’t? If they can point the app during review at a “self hosted” GitHub Enterprise server on a test domain with AAAA that would pass the requirement as stated by gp , without requiring GitHub.com actually support ipv6.
- panny 6mo agoI don't want IPv6. Why would I? It's like a permanent global cookie. You're uniquely tagged and identifiable on every website you visit. >it's in their best interest to ensure users can't host services without them. They'll just keep blocking port 25. IPv6 won't change anything with regards to self hosting.
- farfatched 6mo agoMy OS gives me IPv6 privacy addresses out-the-box which rotate every few hours.
- throwawaypath 6mo agoThe prefix is your globally unique identifier. "Privacy addresses" provide zero privacy.
- ButlerianJihad 6mo ago“Privacy addresses” are named because in the beginning, your auto-generated IPv6 would incorporate your hardware MAC address verbatim, and many people consider the MAC address to be PII.
- throwawaypath 6mo agoHard to believe the committee thought that was a good idea.
- kstrauser 6mo ago> You're uniquely tagged and identifiable on every website you visit. Almost every modern OS enables IPv6 privacy extensions, ie address randomization, by default.
- tengwar2 6mo agoOn the last 64 bits, yes. On mobile phones, the first 64 bits may be fixed. This was something I argued against when I was at Vodafone Group, but didn't get any traction. That was a while back, but I'd assume that this is still the case, and that mobile phone addresses can be used for tracking.
- lmm 6mo agoI think we'll hit a tipping point soon, just like with Python3 - for years and years it seemed almost stalled, then it became easier to start with python3 than python2 and suddenly everyone migrated.
- usui 6mo agoThis seems like wishful thinking. Python3 vs. Python2 seems different than IPv6 vs. IPv4.
- tucnak 6mo ago"seems" is doing a lot of heavy-lifting in your message
- yangm97 6mo ago“Gradually, then suddenly.”
- falsemyrmidon 6mo ago[dead]
- drpixie 6mo ago>> It has barely hit 50% and it's already plateauing. Well, the curve has got to level-out at 100%.
- cowsandmilk 6mo agoNo, it can level out below that and is (as the parent was saying).
- bluGill 6mo agoHow far below is the question. It could level out at 60% - that is believable. However it can't level out at 99% - Somewhere around 95% major sites will decide IPv4 isn't worth supporting and they will just ignore that final 5% of customers, which will force them to upgrade - which in turn will give others confidence to remove their final 4% of customers - until IPv4 dies.
- lazide 6mo agoThere are still ascii dialup bulletin boards out there. and operating model T’s. IPv4 will be around for longer than you or I.
- lxgr 6mo agoThere are also still Telex and X.25 networks around there, not to forget the whole public telephone network! But at some point, getting a native connection to all of these started becoming increasingly rare, and now these are largely emulated/tunneled on top of IP. The same can happen for IPv4.
- Dylan16807 6mo ago> IPv4 will be around for longer than you or I. That's a matter for the legacy network on the other side of the internet to handle, as it converts my IPv6 packets to IPv4.
- School-Cotton 6mo ago
- vr46 6mo agoMy German ISP supports it now, which was the limiting factor for me, and a new VPS I just bought also does, so finally I was able to create my first personal AAAA record. I am hoping that we're seeing a tipping point. Again.
- fogllgldl 6mo agoWorst migration plan ever.
- MiscIdeaMaker99 6mo agoSince when was there ever a plan to disable IPv4 on the Internet? Just because IPv6 is around doesn't mean that IPv4 is going to go away.
- bluGill 6mo agoThat was always the plan for "the future". That is get everyone to IPv6 and then get rid of IPv4. IPv4's days are numbered - but the number looks really big.
- lxgr 6mo agoWhy would we keep around a whole separate Internet? Dual stack was always only intended for the transition period.
- g8oz 6mo agoIt's very hard to get rid of old standards. "The past is never dead. It's not even past"
- lxgr 6mo agoOf course there's an incredibly long tail here, but in the big picture, "nobody except some people maintaining a few legacy systems ever need to learn to work with this protocol anymore" is practically the same thing.
- ectospheno 6mo ago> Also, notice how Android and iOS don't support turning off IPv4. You can trivially connect an iOS device via IPv6 only.
- boredatoms 6mo agoPresumably thats with the network having a PLAT somewhere if you’re relying on CLAT for any v4-only connections when you use safari
- usui 6mo agoCan you share details on how one trivially connects via IPv6 only? I see no option in iOS Wi-Fi settings to do this, and I think it's reasonable to expect not to have to turn off IPv4 on my access point to test IPv6-only networking.
- unethical_ban 6mo agoI think they're saying you can't force disable ipv4 entirely.
- ectospheno 6mo agoI’m going to guess no one responding to me has actually tried connecting to an IPv6 only network because it works without incident. Will your apps? Who knows - apple hasn’t always been great at enforcing that.
- RiverCrochet 6mo ago> It has barely hit 50% and it's already plateauing. This adoption rate is ridiculous despite basically all network interfaces supporting it It's fine. IPv4 and IPv6 can be used at the same time. There's no hurry. Network interfaces support anything as long as both sides agree (nothing stopping you from building your own IPX network over MPLS). People can move to IPv6 when the IPv4-as-real-estate speculators get out of control, and if IPv6 prevents IPv4 rental prices from going haywire, then it's served a useful purpose. I saw a news article that said something about India considering moving to IPv6-only? That's going to be interesting if the rest of the world moves to IPv6 and the U.S. doesn't. > End users shouldn't need to set up NAT64/6to4 tunneling. It should be ISPs doing that to prepare for the transition. 100%
- bananamogul 6mo agoI've been hearing that those speculators were going to get out of control and the IPv4 price was going to skyrocket for 10+ years. Yet I can still rent a VPS with IPv4 for $12/year from a wide variety of providers.
- RiverCrochet 6mo agoFor now, :) Hopefully it continues. > if IPv6 prevents IPv4 rental prices from going haywire, then it's served a useful purpose. Competition is good.
- Dylan16807 6mo agoYou can, but a significant portion of that money is going toward paying off that IP. "Skyrocket" is wrong but the market cap of IPv4 addresses is quite high.
- realityking 6mo agoThe Czech government has announced it’ll stop offering its services via IPv4 in June 2032. Source https://konecipv4.cz/en/ https://konecipv4.cz/en/
- crazygringo 6mo ago> It has barely hit 50% and it's already plateauing. Is it plateauing? From the chart it doesn't look that way at all to me. You could say it's flat between August 2025 and now, but it also was from Jun 2024-Feb 2025, or August 2023-March 2024. There's just a lot of noise to it -- lots of short plateaus or even dips followed by lots of sudden jumps. Indeed, it seems to have a bit of a yearly cycle to it, suggesting we're at the inflection point of another jump upwards. So it still seems to be growing strongly to me. The rate of growth has slowed maybe the tiniest bit 2024-2026 compared 2018-2023, but I don't see it anywhere close to plateauing yet.