i have a question, when iphone was introduced in 2007, 3G came AFTER that, then 4g and now 5g. why didn't the mobile revolution help move ipv6 adoption? i mean at the time, why wasn't 3G built on ipv6 instead of basing on ipv4? couldn't apple have forced websites to play nice with ipv6 to get more users from iphone crowd? android would have followed suit?
i get the whole legacy thing but since transitioning to lets say gigabit internet and beyond, that is somewhat fresh tech so why wasn't that stack made ipv6 primarily and not ipv4?
3G predate iPhone by a lot. There were 3G Smartphones ( Symbian ) or 3G Mobile phones years before iPhone. The first 3G network if I remember correctly "launched" before year 2000 in Japan. ( That is why some analyst suggest that iPhone was bringing the Japanese Internet to the world with touch screen. )
The 3G Spec ( Now known as 3GPP ) predate 2000. 4G was the first system moving from circuit switch to packet-based switching. As that was a lot on their plate already. Remember 4G was designed in an era where 3G was considered a flop. Billions were paid to buy spectrum and equipment but MNO for years were losing money. iPhone was the saviour to MNO as Apple managed to push ARPU instead of their death spiral.
There were talks of a completely new network stack for 5G and later 6G. I think that is still an ongoing research. But without Smartphone I am willing to bet ipv6 would have been no where nearly one tenth of today's usage.
In India, on 11 December 2008, the first 3G mobile and internet services were launched by a state-owned company, Mahanagar Telecom Nigam Limited (MTNL),
maybe in japan but i saw it AFTER the iphone came out and that is what i wrote.
Mobile is driving IPv6 adoption. Look at Google's IPv6 usage rate over time (https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html), and you'll notice there's a clear cyclical nature in IPv6 usage, with IPv6 peaking in weekends and troughing in weekdays (except in late December). And the COVID lockdown suddenly causes the weekday troughs to jump up 1.5 percentage points.
Not just mobile, home users too. And although some of us wanted IPv6 just like the Internet itself the vast majority of people just got it because it seemed like that's what everybody had. Which is fine.
When Sarah's mom's ISP rolls out IPv6 (or maybe when she gets new CPE because she upgraded service, moved home, or it just eventually died), her devices get IPv6, but she doesn't care, Facebook still works (it might be slightly faster, but not noticeably) and Sarah's mom doesn't know what the Internet Protocol Version Six is except that it sounds like something from a Star Trek convention.
Sarah's employer is Big Corp. When Big Corp's ISP rolls out IPv6, Big Corp IT agree that since not everybody went on the IPv6 training course yet, they should explicitly disable IPv6 to avoid unspecified "problems". Everything still works as before and Big Corp's IT department are cheerfully running stuff that actually matters in the Cloud, so what do they need more addresses for anyway? Maybe in 2025 there will be a budgetary requirement for IPv6 at Big Corp. Or maybe not. Perhaps the best chance for Big Corp to get IPv6 is if IT screws up and mistakenly doesn't disable it, then they find that later doing so makes things worse.
Mobile is leading the IPv6 transition, for exactly the reasons you think it is. It just happened bit later than what you expected. I'm pretty sure that vast majority of 5G deployments support IPv6.
iPhone 2G was released when 3G networks were becoming common among better telcos. For critical period in the early 3GPP network stack, it was niche player.
However, Mobile networks are actually biggest users of IPv6, especially if the rumour I heard about licensing being cheaper on IPv6 is true (IPv6 is also in many ways cheaper on backbone implementation).
This is why Apple recommends IPv6 accessible sites, because for many mobile networks IPv6 is faster - it avoids multiple levels of network address translation through possibly limited number of gateways.
The mobile stack itself doesn't really care for IPv4 vs IPv6 except for v6 making it much easier to build the network and having easier IP Mobility (keeping connections across moving addresses). Protocols run perfectly well on both v4 and v6 (SIP, IPsec, various other L4 and higher protocols involved)
i get the whole legacy thing but since transitioning to lets say gigabit internet and beyond, that is somewhat fresh tech so why wasn't that stack made ipv6 primarily and not ipv4?
i am truly clueless on this