What I think (or at least hope) that this post is missing, is the ever-growing opportunity cost of having a population of people that are flat out unable to access your service. Google's IPv6 page currently has almost all of Africa at near-0% v6 adoption, but this map https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS?view=map shows a lot of African countries that still have low internet access. With such a long way to go towards full access, and in a lot of countries, exponentially rising populations, could a lot of African ISPs give up on the cost and/or CGNAT complexity of trying to magic up so many new IPv4 connections, and go all in on v6? That's only my layman speculation though.
I think search engines are very well positioned to massively help IPv6 addoption. For example, they could limit the number of search hits to an IPv4 only site. A mom an pop page without IPv6 is fine, a top 1000 site is inexcusable in 2018 and contributing to the vicious circle.
On the user facing side, they could inform consumers when they are connecting from IPv4 only networks, to realy drive home the point that they are receiving a sub-par service. It might not be true today, but in the long run it's true for the internet as a whole, stuck in IPv4. And if people perceive IPv6 as desirable, they will prefer it given the choice even if they don't understand exactly what it is, just like they prefer a 4G service to a 3G one.
What incentive would Google and Microsoft have to do this? IPv4 exhaustion costs them too, in routing performance and manpower to manage a scarce resource. Also, reliable end to end connectivity is an enabler for the type of technologies they push, limiting telco control over their users. Massive growth markets are trumped by lack of IP space, the whole of Afrinic only has a few /8. That means African carriers will do massive NAT.
Good. Should honestly charge more. The slow adoption of IPv6 is an embarrassment for everybody in tech. Tech talks of inclusivity yet looking behind the curtains that is not always the case.
Developing countries often do not have the money to buy/lease IPv4 public addresses so therefore they force their subscribers to IPv6. With most of the internet still on ipv4, this makes them inaccessible (ie, github) unless you are technically inclined.
IMHO we aren't seeing these developing countries as early adopters of mass IPv6 or having local-only services move to IPv6-only due to lack of IPv4 addresses.
Like, I fully understand that they would be feeling much more pressure to migrate, but I don't see that this pressure working; and if even they aren't pushed to IPv6 then why would the western world do so?
I heard somewhere that some developing countries as basically ipv6 only since there is no reasonable/economical way for them to get ipv4 connectivity, so maybe the problem will take care of itself as more and more people in the world come online. People have money and as long as it makes economical sense to serve more people, ipv6 will win in the end.
ISP have to buy IPv4 addresses proportional to the number of customers who need them. If their customers switch to IPv6 then the ISPs' costs will go down. Slightly.
That said, western governments can, should, and (somewhat) do mandate IPv6 adoption. It's slow, though. IIRC it's something like 2-3% a year and we're at 20-30%, so in a decade we should have a majority supporting IPv6 and hopefully that will cause some sort of feedback loop forcing universal IPv6 support for practical reasons.
Furthermore, the lowest adoption tends to be in developing countries (Africa, parts of Asia and South-America), and I bet simple financial reasons are a decent part of the reason for that, if not the primary reason. The Indian government has invested quite a lot in IPv6, so it's leading in adoption rates last time I checked. This is good long-term thinking IMO, since developing countries are also the worst affected due to less addresses being assigned to them, but not every (developing) country has the means for that, and there are often other, more pressing, matters to deal with too.
Carrier-grade NAT (multiple consumers sharing the same IPv4 address) mostly averted catastrophic problems though. It's not perfect, but it works.
I think for a long time the only thing that will push IPv6 uptake will be legislation.
ISPs don't want to implement it because their customers aren't pushing them to, because websites aren't typically IPv6-only, because that's a terrible business model.
So unless we force or incentivize ISPs to implement IPv6 access through law, it's going to be a long time before we hit the breaking point where something HAS to be done by ISPs
As long as ISPs are unwilling to actually work on the problem on letting their customers use ipv6, applications/services will continue to be uninterested in exposing ipv6 for usage.
From what I understand the problem with IPv6 isn't technical problems it is with legacy. According to what I know in Africa and Asia they have mostly already been running on IPv6 the problem is just basically a bunch of lazy network admins in NA and the EU that don't want to learn the new tech and organizations that don't want to switch.
My whole country of 80 million people with very high Internet usage is still not supporting IPv6 at all (and residential connections are behind CGNAT). I'm pretty sure there are many more. IPv6 might be a thing in US or Europe, but definitely not in the world.
American here, I've had IPv6 on literally every device I've had for almost a decade now. Every mobile provider has been v6 since LTE. Comcast migrated to v6 over a decade ago because they exhausted 10.0.0.0/8 in their control plane network (they have a lot of cable modems). And I'm on Google Fiber now which is all v6.
There's probably a few other ISPs that need a good kick to the groin in the US, but the general feeling I get here is that the real stragglers in v6 deployment are other countries. Indeed, looking at Google's IPv6 map[0] it's all countries in Africa and the Middle East that have the worst v6 adoption. It's places where there isn't enough demand for addressing to make CGNAT unviable and IPv6 necessary.
That’s what’s happening here in Spain. The biggest ISPs are doing nothing to migrate to IPv6 because they are sitting on a shitload of IPv4 addresses and that makes it very hard for new ISPs to compete.
There is already a price, which is often significant given the lack of supply. I've read about several ISPs moving to IPv6 explicitly due to cost, and mobile carriers are well known to use v6 only (with gateways) to grow their market.
By now I'm semi-convinced ISPs are deliberately holding back IPv6 in order to make a buck selling static IPs. They charge a good chunk of money per month for an IPv4 address (at least in Switzerland, the UK, and New Zealand), which is basically just rent extraction from artificial scarcity. And it's pretty obvious that once they transition to IPv6 there is no good reason not to give every single customer enough static IPs for a lifetime of devices.
The ISPs dragging their feet on IPV6 implementation are the biggest culprits in holding back progress. Western governments should step in and mandate IPV6 adoption for ISPs
Strange time to give up on IPv6. Global availability is ~36% now and many countries it crossed 50% in 2021. If anything its time to ditch IPv4 once and for all.
What? The google ipv6 tracking page shows linear growth. Iirc we are close to tipping over to 50% of users on ipv6. Especially with the development of Asia and Africa, ipv6 still looks like it will eventually be the default.
It's mostly African and Asian countries with (very) low adoptions, and this translates to "screw all the countries too poor to adopt IPv6, and let's reduce their chances in the global economy even more". I'm putting it rather sharp here and I have no doubt that's not what your intent is, but that's absolutely an effect of forbidding IPv4.
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