First of all, it is not reasonable to blame the protocol for your ISP's inability to configure it properly.
Secondly, I don't get this mentality that IPv6 is some totally inferior thing and I really don't get people advising others to disable IPv6 just because they don't understand it.
Statements like "IPv4 does everything I need!" are, ultimately, totally missing the point. The fact is that we have hit the scale ceiling of the IPv4 address space and other cracks are showing and now the entire world needs something that will scale for the next few hundred billion devices.
IPv6 is the protocol that will lift the scale ceiling higher, not just for you and your needs, but for everyone. It won't really change anything performance-wise, nor will it change how higher-layer protocols like TCP and UDP work, but that's intentional.
You can hold out on principle if you like but it won't gain you anything. The world will just migrate around you eventually.
Your odd hostility is misplaced here. You seem to think I'm opposed to changing to IPv6, but I'm really not.
I'm describing various reasons why there is such slow adoption of IPv6. Ridiculing and being mad at people for avoiding it isn't likely to make them feel any differently. Understanding the resistance might be helpful in terms of getting people over that hump.
"this is an entirely new protocol by the definition "
NO!!!
this is what the parent comment meant about ipv6 design. Add an octet and that's it. Same protocol with same rules just a bigger address.
It may be a different version of IP but the protocol and supporting protocols like ARP and DHCP just need to support the new IP.
The reason IPv6 failed is the same reason why when new devs join a team, they find how everything is wrong and try to fix it all and leave a bigger mess than what they started with. You solve problems one step at a time. Overhauls are only justified when your objective is specifically to improve the whole system.
"The reason for the slow IPv6 adoption is that there was no financial or business pressure."
That is only part of the reason. The other part is it is a pain to use, there is no way to use it without also supporting v4 and on top of that you have to learn and adapt other new protocols, addressing schemes, gotcha's and much more.
Well put. I’ve been shocked by the elitist attitude by many commenter who don’t see the issue IPv6 has for _most_ non-IT professionals.
Facts are these: IPv6 is a failure; it didn’t provide a way to conexist with IPv4 [1] and it did _not_ have a _compelling_ benefit to most people. The benefits cited makes no difference to most.
> […] while providing IPv6 routing where necessary.
This is the key point. Right now, and on the short term, IPv6 is not necessary at all. Or at least it isn't perceived to be. Reason: everyone is still compatible with IPv4. I know it's as stupid as racing towards a concrete wall, telling yourself that you can always slam the breaks later, but we seem to race towards that wall anyway.
> People are basically in denial. […] they have seemingly no accountability […]
I completely agree. But I can't think of a way to solve this.
Not OP, but I can tell you why I as a consumer am very much not interested in IPv6. My ISP supports it, but I have intentionally disabled it.
It only causes problems for me with absolutely no gain. There isn't a single website I can't reach, and no website that I've found runs any quicker when using IPv6.
But at the same time, if I have v6 on, it causes delays in name resolution and sometimes I just can't connect to a site until I disable v6.
I still have an addressable v4 address, so I can still run a home server.
I don't know how to fix this. I know that v6 is good for the planet, and I know these problems won't get better until more people are using v6, but it's definitely a chicken/egg problem.
I don't get why people keep advocating for IPv6, when it has all the adoption of the Dart Programming Language. It's obviously not working for a majority of businesses, or they would have adopted it. We just need to create an IPv7, which is just IPv4 with 64 bits of address space. I don't get why this is such a hard concept for people to swallow. IPv4 works fine, we're comfortable with it, we like it, let's just make it bigger. We can even make the new system backwards compatible. 0.0.0.0.127.0.0.1 is still localhost, for example.
"But that's so hacky", you say. "We need to fix the old standard." This is what Intel said with its Intel 64 Itanium processor. Break with the old instruction set and make it better. AMD came out with Opteron[1], a hacky extension of the x86 ISA but for 64 bit. Backwards compatible. Swept the market. It's why your binaries are compiled to "amd64" now.
Yes, IPv4 has quirks, and those quirks are well understood and lots of code exists now to deal with them. Let's not find out all the quirks of a new system the hard way for seemingly little benefit.
"Many people I talk with don't believe that IPv6 is the future and I commonly hear that they have forcibly disabled it on their computers due to this or that random problem."
It is their choice to make not anyone else's. They could be right. It might not be the future. I am one of those non-believers. I would love an improved protocol but I do not see IPv6 as the right fit. I think it is no coincidence that the providers are having problems with offering it to customers. Networking is complex and error-prone enough without IPv6. It is less so with IPv6? We know what the IPv6 zealots will say. Beware of "analyses" that focus solely on benefits without considering costs.
I understand that. I'm just saying that the people who don't want to try IPv6 aren't motivated by that. For many the calculus is simply functionality divided by effort. They're not configuring IPv6 because it's hard or because it doesn't work. They're not configuring IPv6 because they already use IPv4 and it still works for them.
"although software support is virtually a requirement these days"
Who's fault is this again?
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"- IPv6 is absolutely ready for prime-time and has been for awhile
BUT
"- About half of the internet sites I rely on support IPv6 natively, so there needs to be more pressure on site admins and CDNs to support IPv6 natively"
That is a contradiction.
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"There seems to be a lack of drive (judging by forum posts) to enable IPv6 on internet services by admins, either because they don’t care to, or it’s more work to manage a public IPv4 and public IPv6 presence"
Again, who's fault is it that its so hard? What is the payoff for the extra work?
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- Networks should be designed IPv6-first instead of IPv4-first, and this design approach largely solves most of the major issues
K thanx, but that's not the way virtually every company works. Mayyyyybe a startup? This is unrealistic.
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"Other operating systems are bit of hit or miss"
so... IPV6 is NOT NOT NOT ready for prime time, is that what you are saying?
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What dream world are the ipv6 people living in?
I love this. Who should be implementing ipv6 stacks in OS's? Probably ipv6 people, but ... where are they again? The amount of blame is crazy.
A protocol switchover of this magnitude is about outreach and assistance. The ipv6 crowd has NEVER displayed that, just arrogance, dismissal, and waited for things to get "so bad" in ipv4 that it transferred.
Which is why ipv6 people HATE HATE HATE NAT. It has delayed their grand moment by decades.
...
In an ideal world, the ip++ protocol would have been easier, not harder. BLog posts wouldn't be victim blaming, throwing around NAT64, 464XLAT, DNS64
DNS64 kills me. WHy is there a totally different service for ipv6? Isn't DNS just a key-value store? People put all types of crap into DNS, including, I believe, ipv6 addresses.
Why isn't there a DNS record type that basically lists both an ipv4 and ipv6 for a name, along with negotiation information? Might that make transition a lot easier? Maybe it does, but it isn't in this article.
Just ... all the same problematic attitudes, no progress on issues, my way or highway, and denial.
you've /never/ heard anyone call ipv6 long, confusing, and complicated? I've basically /only/ heard people say that.
This is probably because the idealized world of "only network engineers" is leaky. Programmers, sysadmins, people trying to get their network printer to work, non-specialists have to interface with network addresses constantly.
Saying they shouldn't is not a description of reality. Not everyone who needs to set up or diagnose a network do so as a career path.
Almost all hardware and software has supported ipv6 for many many years. The humans using it are the ones that shut it off or disable it. Unless you address the human behavior of why that is, this problem will not be addressed.
I claim there needs to be a friendlier, casual interface that makes people's lives easier. It can be a crude kneecapped sheen so long as it addresses the needs of the general user. Then they'll use ipv6, not for ideology or virtue reasons about the commons but because it makes their lives easier
Is it that difficult to setup, or are people biased against it when something they've got works, and something new doesn't?
When IPv6 doesn't work, it's easy to blame it, turn it off and stick with IPv4 because it works. When IPv4 doesn't work it's a problem that has to be fixed to access the vast majority of services online.
If your DNS can't resolve A records, you'd immediately complain and get it fixed.
This. IPV4 is a mess.....and its extremely frustrating just how unsupported ipv6 is.
IPV6 is one of those things where if isp,'s just switched over to it, I'd have so less nightmares caused by cgnat and that bullshit like how expensive static IP's are.
Many its because I'm not working at a ISP or a teir 1 backbone but forcing the transition to ipv6 seems like overall it would be less of a clusterfuck than our current ipv4 stuff. I know their is stuff going to break, anytime changes are made at this scale it often has some hickups....but dear god I really hate how static IP's are so expensive, and how expensive a small IP block is. Also IPV6 is just an excuse to get fiber everywhere.....I hate how slow many services are.
> IPv6 once widely implemented might solve the problem, since new fixed IPv4 addresses are unobtanium for non corporate networks; I'm not holding my breath though.
I have this strange feeling that we (the general public) are, in some manner, being segregated away from full implementation if IPv6 for precisely this reason.
That the limitations of IPv4 have benefitted the centralization of our internet access; IPv6, due to its sheer size of address space, turns that space into a commodity that is easily shared. ISPs would (or should) cease to be "gateways" and instead become mere infrastructure.
Assuming efficient network bandwidth allocation, it would allow for easy p2p or "peering"-like arrangements, which isn't easy or as scalable with IPv4 today.
But of course, that isn't in their business interest.
I can't think of any reason why IPv6 isn't "fully deployed" today; I'm sure there's a lot of legacy hardware out there that doesn't support it, but I would think it would be a minority amount in the whole "grand scheme" of the internet. Certainly the "end points" - our workstations and phones and such - are all IPv6 capable today. There's no real good reason for the rest of it not to be - except for control over access.
ISPs are a massive monopoly in the USA. IPV6 can't be adopted by software until a sufficient number of the backbone works. I've heard that "the backbone is all working for ipv6". Um, is comcast? Wasn't last time I had comcast.
If the ISP monopolies aren't 100% ipv6 (and you see lots of comments here that ipv6 support in ISPs is still "substandard") and convenient, then you can't blame the software people.
Look at your success story in mobile (which is behind a huge NAT to translate things to the "real" internet by the way). How did that work? Oh, you probably wrangled the three or four mobile companies into a room and got them to agree on protocols. Wow, success.
This needs to happen for the rest of ISPs. The fact it hasn't isn't a software issue, it is a governance issue. The failure is in the governance, the outreach with the real policy hammers like the FCC and ISP monopolies.
The governance has failed. It's been failing about 15 years longer than it should. FIFTEEN YEARS OF FAILURE!
Stop blaming reticent programmers, because IPV4 networking is still much much much easier than ipv6 in software, and IPV4 networking SUCKS between NATs and bridges and internal/external IPs and port mappings and what's-my-ip-on-the-other-end and dynamic DNS. Ohmygod it sucks. And ipv6 is worse than that!
Stop blaming the software people. IPV6 governance and outreach failed. Failed failed failed failed.
I don't want ipv6 to fail. I WANT STATIC IPs! EVERY PROGRAMMER WANTS STATIC IPS!
Get the ISPs and FCC in a room. Get google and microsoft and whoever else you need to lean on them. Get Amazon and google and microsoft IAAS into a room (hm, look, the same companies basically) and lean on them to support ipv6.
The article's right that IPv6 isn't going to happen.
I'm not sure it makes any points besides that.
(1) It's hard to fear our NAT-ed future when we're all living in the NAT-ed present to little ill effect. A typical large company today has more than a /19 allocated to it; if we're really talking about exhausting the TCP endpoint space, that /19 offers 536,000,000 concurrent connections. ISP distribution layers might not do that many packets per second.
(1a) If multiplexing is the problem, we can solve that in a subtransport-layer protocol without a worldwide ISP flag day that renumbers the whole world. There are already transports that are more multiplexing-friendly than TCP --- for instance, SCTP, a well-researched telco protocol.
(2) IPv6 exacerbates routing problems; it doesn't solve them. Routing table explosion and address space size are orthogonal.
(3) If we're embracing our NAT'd future anyways, I'm not sure I care how routable IPv4 are traded, or who has to go ask Halliburton to start paying for their obscene legacy allocation. You decided to work for the ISP, not me. Have fun!
If anything this message says something about the abysmal state of IPv6.
Ultimately the goal of IPv6 is to end IP scarcity. But it can only do this if close to 100% of users and services use IPv6. Seeing it like that it doesn't really matter much if IPv6 adoption is 30% or 60% or 90%. In none of these situations would an ISP connect its customers via IPv6 only or would anyone provide any service that requires IPv6.
I really wonder how IPv6 should ever become mainstream without any deployment strategy. "Let's tell everyone that IPv6 is nice and we need it due to lack of v4 addresses" obviously hasn't worked for more than 20 years.
Secondly, I don't get this mentality that IPv6 is some totally inferior thing and I really don't get people advising others to disable IPv6 just because they don't understand it.
Statements like "IPv4 does everything I need!" are, ultimately, totally missing the point. The fact is that we have hit the scale ceiling of the IPv4 address space and other cracks are showing and now the entire world needs something that will scale for the next few hundred billion devices.
IPv6 is the protocol that will lift the scale ceiling higher, not just for you and your needs, but for everyone. It won't really change anything performance-wise, nor will it change how higher-layer protocols like TCP and UDP work, but that's intentional.
You can hold out on principle if you like but it won't gain you anything. The world will just migrate around you eventually.
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