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How Ready Is IPv6 To Succeed IPv4?
New submitter unixisc writes: Over the last 2 years, June 6th had been observed as IPv6 day. The first time, IPv6 connections were turned on by participants just for a day, and last year, it was turned on for good. A year later, how successful is the global transition to IPv6? According to Cisco 6labs, adoption rates vary from 50% in Belgium to 6% in China, with the U.S. coming somewhere in the middle at 37%. A lot of issues around IPv6, such as the absence of NAT, have apparently been resolved (NAPT is now available and recognized by the IETF). So what are the remaining issues holding people up — be it ISPs, businesses, consumers or anybody else? When could we be near a year when we could turn off all IPv4 connectivity worldwide on an IPv6 only day and nobody would notice?
Absence of NAT is a feature! If not THE feature of IPv6!
The official "switch-on for good" of IPv6 a year ago was entirely seemless in my experience. There wasn't anything to fix, as nothing was broken, and IPv6 autoconfiguration handles everything so there isn't even any setup involved, it just works. This simplicity will be a boon for non-technical users once the IPv6 rollouts gain steam.
Unfortunately the ISPs are still dragging their feet and so public rollout is slow, but it's an always upward trend, and the adoption curve is close to exponential so IPv6 will be ubiquitous before long. So many ISPs are currently planning their rollouts that there's going to be a sudden upsurge when they finally appear.
People shouldn't talk about switchover to IPv6 though, that's not how it works. IPv4 and IPv6 networks run together side by side, and you use both together. Your application (eg. browser) generally picks IPv6 if your destination is accessible on that network, or else it falls back to IPv4. This is all automatic of course. It's better described as a switch on of IPv6 by your ISP followed by your gradual increasing use, not a switchover. There is no plan to switch off IPv4. The last remnants of IPv4-only equipment could still be around and operational for decades ahead.
IPv6 works so well that I recommend everyone to get on it as soon as they can. You'll be able to see 100% of the Internet, whereas if you don't have IPv6 then you're only seeing a part of it. IPv4 is by far the larger part for now of course, but it's not all of it, and the parts you can't reach are growing daily.
Happy First Anniversary of the official turn-on, IPv6! :-)
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
To illustrate, let's look at phone numbers.
Imagine a phone company with 6 digit numbers which wants to give users world-accessible phone-numbers. What did the phone companies do? Easy: Just add prefixes to the numbers and everybody is happy. The old numbers stay valid, you can still connect within the old network(s), nobody has to remember new numbers.
But what if phone-numbers would have been expanded the "IPv6-way"?
Then you would have your old number and would receive a completely different new number, which would also be in an incompatible format (maybe letters instead of digits). Then you would have to update all your phone numbers everywhere, to "switch over". of course such a scheme would fail instantly and that's why IPv6 continues to fail.
The IPv6 adherents just don't get it. If the IPv6-designers were smart enough to just extend the IPv4-address space we would all be running IPv6 already, because it would require no reconfiguration of routers, no reconfiguration of DNS names, no reconfiguration of anything.
But these morons thought that a billion people will just change all their addresses just because they tell them. Well, it doesn't work that way.
It isn't (and never was) a question of capabilities. It is a question of cost. Most decision makers at every level from individuals on up to CEOs view IT (correctly BTW) as an expense, not a corporate treasure. The IP6v train left the station without the capabilities required to make eventual I{Pv4 replacement cheap and easy -- backward capability and NAT. Lots of people tried to point out that was a mistake. It was done anyway, and the same folks that didn't understand why it was a mistake still don't seem to understand why it was a mistake.
Compared to the average business or public organization, our home setup here is not very complex at all. But we still have about two dozen devices whose software would need to be upgraded in order to change from IPv4. to IPv6. And we'd probably have to buy some new kit because some of the routers and software probably have flawed IPv6 implementations -- if they have IPv6 at all. And, of course our ISP is IPv4. Assuming they can/will deign to talk to us using IPv6 it's a safe bet that "upgrading" would cost us more time and money.
And what do we get from all that? IFAICS all we get is the capability to expose all the digital devices in the house to external hackers. Why would we want to do that? Much less spend time and money to do that?
It'll most likely be a long, long time before IPv6 completely replaces IPv4.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey