The people who make the decisions about IPv6 adoption are not users, they are ISPs. You get an IPv4 address on your router WAN port because that is what your ISP gives to you.
From an ISP's point of view IPv6 is a lot of No Business Case. Those three words are the death knell for any proposal to do anything in any business that expects to be here next year. It has exactly nothing to do with the geeky I-could-have-designed-it-better arguments about the technology.
If you are an ISP that is a going concern, with a bunch of customers sitting on IPv4 addresses, then handing out IPv6 addresses makes no difference, except when it breaks something. You still have to give your customers just as many IPv4 addresses. So why bother?
If you plan to migrate your customers to IPv6 then you are a lunatic. Its going to break stuff. Lots of websites don't exist on IPv6, and customers are going to notice. Also your customers have spent the last 20 years slowly picking up bits of IPv4 lore, like the vital importance of 192.168.0.1, and are going to be puzzled when this doesn't work any more. All of this translates into higher support costs and more customer churn.
Also, your allocated block of IPv4 addresses is a valuable asset in its own right; not only does it have real financial value (around $20 per address at present), but it also acts as a barrier to entry for competitors; if you want to set up in business as an ISP you are going to have to acquire some IPv4 address blocks from somewhere, and they aren't making any more of them. Managers are trained to look for barriers to entry to their industry, and the current IPv4 situation is exactly that. No sane manager is going to do something to make it easier for new competitors.
Eventually, of course, the dam is going to break and IPv6 will become ubiquitous. ISPs will decide that buying blocks of IPv4 addresses costs more than providing new customers with IPv6 plus some kind of carrier-grade NAT for legacy IPv4 addresses. More website hosting companies will support IPv6 in response, and suddenly IPv4 will be so last-decade.
There are widely used ways to deploy IPv6 networks compatible with the IPv4 internet.
NAT64/DNS64 (iOS): Your device only gets an IPv6 address, but when it queries an ipv4onlydomain.com, it receives an IPv6 address mapped to the domains IPv4 address. When it sends packets to it, they are translated by the ISP to IPv4. All their customers remain IPv6-only. This method requires apps to be able to handle IPv6 addresses, which Apple enforced.
XLAT464 (Android, Windows): your device gets an IPv6 address. The OS translates IPv4 packets to a special range of IPv6 before sending them out, because you’re only connected over IPv6. The ISP translates them to IPv4 to reach legacy services.
The benfit is: absolutely no NAT for IPv6 packets. Complete end-to-end connectivity.
192.168.0.1 shouldn’t be glorified. Good riddance. We have mDNS now, just have the user type router.local into their browser.
You can also do the ipv4 to IPv6 translation on the server itself, then the server is can be purely IPv6 attached.
Fun trivia:
A few years ago I wrote a kernel module, that together with existing kernel mechanisms allowed almost all transition tech at a time, and ended up in a bunch of CPEs:
You can see the pull request activity... two pull requests in the past month... before that it was last time in 2017. So some things seem to be moving.
Privacy extensions means that every host on your network picks a random IP to make outbound connections from. They pick new random IPs periodically (by default usually after 24 hours), while keeping the old ones for a short period (by default usually 7 days) so that existing connections aren't broken. Rebooting or connecting to a new network will also remove the existing privacy addresses and generate new ones.
Remote servers will see the privacy address, but they won't know which machine the address belongs to. The addresses will also be abandoned after a maximum of a week, so you can't trawling through your old server logs to find active v6 addresses either.
They'll still be able to see what network you're coming from, but that's not something that NATing outbound connections from your network would help with anyway.
> If you plan to migrate your customers to IPv6 then you are a lunatic.
Well...
Comcast made IPv6 on-by-default to all residential customers some time ago (IIRC) and available (not sure if on-by-default) to all business customers. [1] Verizon requires all LTE devices to support v6 [2] and achieved >70% penetration in 2016 [3] (I'm too lazy to find a more recent statistic.) T-Mobile launched v6only in 2014 [4] and hit >90% in 2018. [5]
> Eventually, of course, the dam is going to break and IPv6 will become ubiquitous. ISPs will decide that buying blocks of IPv4 addresses costs more than providing new customers with IPv6 plus some kind of carrier-grade NAT for legacy IPv4 addresses. More website hosting companies will support IPv6 in response, and suddenly IPv4 will be so last-decade.
> ISPs will decide that buying blocks of IPv4 addresses costs more than providing new customers with IPv6 plus some kind of carrier-grade NAT for legacy IPv4 addresses.
This implies an ISP can do math. Frontier acquired lots of IPv4 addresses w/ it's $10B purchase of Verizon assets(in 2015 & $7B in 2010 & 2B of AT&T).
I still have not figured out how to get an IPv6 lease from Comcast at my home; anyone who can point to a recent guide on doing so would be greatly appreciated!
The comcast connection I have with my own cable modem uses DHCPv6 with a /56 prefix. Beyond that you'll have to search for instructions on how to set it up with whatever router you are using.
Maybe I haven't tried since Comcast turned on v6 for everyone, but I just set up /etc/network/interfaces as specified in https://wiki.debian.org/IPv6PrefixDelegation and it just worked this time!
By migrate I think the OP meant take away their IPv4 address. IPv6 adoption may be at 42% but unless it is at 99.999% you will have a lot of issues when not allocating an IPv4 address.
It doesn't have to be that high. Tell a small business that in exchange for small percentage of their customers going elsewhere they can sell their IPv4 address for $ and some will take it.
Not necessarily. I have no v4 on my desktop and I'm not hitting a lot of issues. It only becomes an issue if you don't implement some form of backwards compatibility.
I occasionally find websites that are broken and don't load, but that only happens rarely and it's not exactly a problem that's exclusive to v6.
IoT should be the primary adopter of IPv6. those devices don't need to be able to access every server on the internet, and they only run into problems if they connect to a wifi that doesn't support IPv6
if you disagree, i'd appreciate if you could explain why...
at least it's a solveable problem, because it's in the customers sphere of influence, whereas getting all websites i am interested in onto IPv6 is not.
I'm familiar with at least one use case. The largest company that builds the NICs for smart meters has its own custom wireless network technology, but on top of that runs IPv6 so that it can communicate with millions of devices.
Yes, in hindsight a lot of people were hopelessly optimistic about the timeline. That doesn't mean it will never come to pass. The increasingly dire economics of IPv4 will force a disruptive change at some point, and IPv6 remains the heir apparent.
> the vital importance of 192.168.0.1, and are going to be puzzled when this doesn't work any more
Just keep shipping routers that support both IPv4 and IPv6 and you won't have a problem. If IPv6 gets popular enough, you won't even need NAT on that interface--it will just be an admin network. This is only an issue when major OSes start dropping IPv4.
Yeah, we live in a culture where thinking about anything but next quarter revenue is discouraged in companies. In such a culture, anything but a status quo is not going to happen easily.
No, most companies actually do think in long term. Problem is, most people/companies are wrong about most things they think long term on.
The problem with ip6, if there was only just 1, is that they cared more about the engineering than what customers wanted/needed. their attitude was: if they dont use it, well they are just stupid, everyone else will use it and have to switch anyways.
From an ISP's point of view IPv6 is a lot of No Business Case. Those three words are the death knell for any proposal to do anything in any business that expects to be here next year. It has exactly nothing to do with the geeky I-could-have-designed-it-better arguments about the technology.
If you are an ISP that is a going concern, with a bunch of customers sitting on IPv4 addresses, then handing out IPv6 addresses makes no difference, except when it breaks something. You still have to give your customers just as many IPv4 addresses. So why bother?
If you plan to migrate your customers to IPv6 then you are a lunatic. Its going to break stuff. Lots of websites don't exist on IPv6, and customers are going to notice. Also your customers have spent the last 20 years slowly picking up bits of IPv4 lore, like the vital importance of 192.168.0.1, and are going to be puzzled when this doesn't work any more. All of this translates into higher support costs and more customer churn.
Also, your allocated block of IPv4 addresses is a valuable asset in its own right; not only does it have real financial value (around $20 per address at present), but it also acts as a barrier to entry for competitors; if you want to set up in business as an ISP you are going to have to acquire some IPv4 address blocks from somewhere, and they aren't making any more of them. Managers are trained to look for barriers to entry to their industry, and the current IPv4 situation is exactly that. No sane manager is going to do something to make it easier for new competitors.
Eventually, of course, the dam is going to break and IPv6 will become ubiquitous. ISPs will decide that buying blocks of IPv4 addresses costs more than providing new customers with IPv6 plus some kind of carrier-grade NAT for legacy IPv4 addresses. More website hosting companies will support IPv6 in response, and suddenly IPv4 will be so last-decade.