While price of ipv4 addresses are increasing, the world has slowly been adopting ipv6. From the graph above, I'd say we cross over 50% in about 2-3 years time. At some point the "dash" to adopt ipv6 starts, and brave folks will drop support for ipv4. Then it'll probably evaporate between 2030-2035.
That is a very one-sided view of adoption. It ties directly with the rise of mobile and internet in areas that wasn't able to grab IPv4 addresses in time. Such as India. Not sure what France is doing though, maybe something right.
So, from my perspective (which obviously is tied to my location) is that all computers have IPv4 (haven't heard (and I've asked) of a single consumer ISP that offers IPv6) but all mobile phones have IPv6. Whether people in general do most searches on mobile or PC is gonna change that graph dramatically, but won't explain what I would be interested in regarding ipv6 adoption. That is, how much of the world would be broken without IPv4?
And for that, that graph isn't completely useless - but not too far off.
All the big cable and fiber internet providers I've worked with in the US support IPv6, even evil nasty ones like Comcast have supported it for a decade now.
On their leased hardware, it is enabled from what I've seen. And if you are running your own modem and router, you will get IPv6 if you configure your setup to request it (via DHCP). They will even give you a /60 if your DHCP client asks for it.
Even? /60 should be the minimum, even home users usually have a couple subnets (guest networks for example, sometimes one for the router's WAN link) and you want the boundary to be on a nybble boundary
Yeah, it's not always, but for most home networks it probably is. Ideally they'd give you a /56 or even a /48, but giving those on request and a /60 by default is fine.
Neat, very different results. But still looking at it from the wrong direction?
That is, ipv6 for clients. But I'm more interested in servers, because that is what would affect me if I don't have IPv4. Such as the experiences described by OP in this thread.
ipv6-only web sites are borderline nonexistant, because no one who needs to maintain a profit dares to cut off a revenue stream from legacy ip only users (yet).
Ugh, Centurylink. Their networks, both DSL and Fiber, support IPv6 but you need to go into the router config and explicitly enable it which is why they show up as 0.5% IPv6 supported in that first link despite every other top-10 US ISP having at least 50%. I've enabled v6 on my home connections with them on both DSL and fiber and I've had absolutely no problems with it. I wish they would enable it by default with their consumer network equipment.
> At some point the "dash" to adopt ipv6 starts, and brave folks will drop support for ipv4.
I wouldn't be sure about that. I don't see any "dash" to support v6 in our future, when the option to just keep working around issues with v4 is so much easier and cheaper in the moment. Really, what does anyone have to gain by switching to v6?
The thing is, it's not v6 or v4, it's v6, v4 with a price premium, or v4 with CGNAT.
CGNAT sucks. Stuff blocks you because you get lumped in with other users. You can't take inbound connections. Average users don't know that, but they get annoyed with side effects. Not being able to play multiplayer stuff or it being slow/high latency because of no inbound connection. Having to do extra CAPTCHAs, being straight out blocked, etc...
Price and annoyance are absolutely things people want to avoid.
I guarantee you at some point, some ISP is going to realise they can market themselves as the gamer ISP and sell IPv6 as the option for pro gamers to ensure the lowest latency in their games. CGNAT will be the congested roads, IPv6 the open motorway. (To be clear, it obviously isn't that simple, but I'd put money on that's how they'll sell it.)
I agree that CGNAT sucks -- for the user. But users don't exactly have a ton of power here. And CGNAT is mostly fine for anyone but power users; I've never experienced being blocked or excessive CAPTCHAs when on a CGNATed cell network.
> I don't see any "dash" to support v6 in our future, when the option to just keep working around issues with v4 is so much easier and cheaper in the moment.
30-40% global adoption in ~10 years may or may not be a "dash", but it's also not nothing.
"easier and cheaper" is very much not the case at larger scale. legacy ip space is only growing more expensive, & cgnat platforms are not cheap. even if a carrier HAS TO deploy cgnat, deploying ipv6 first means you don't need to buy cgnat capacity for any v6-native traffic (which is a non trivial volume)
> Really, what does anyone have to gain by switching to v6?
the above, & also a future-proofed, infinitely scalable network. any org's that do alot of m&a don't have to play as many stupid rfc1918 integration games.
if you don't deal w/ scale, yea, hard to see the benefits. fair.
> 30-40% global adoption in ~10 years may or may not be a "dash", but it's also not nothing.
Still nowhere close to being remotely unusable after soon 30 years is very very close to nothing.
Regarding benefits: Amazon, Azure and all the other major VPS companies has a lot to gain from IP addresses being expensive, since it makes it almost impossible for new players to enter the market. ISPs may pay for CGNAT in terms of infrastructure and complexity, but they save in support and abuse mitigation cost by making it impossible for normal people to host their own stuff, they save in support cost by not dealing with customers' broken products which get confused by IPv6, and they gain financially from charging a ton for "pro"/"enterprise" non-CGNAT connections.
And for any kind of web service, supporting IPv6 is obviously just a net negative, since you have to deal with both v4 and v6 rather than just v4.
So I suppose I'm saying, sure, there are minor things to gain from v6, but it's not clear that they outweigh the (opportunity) cost of v6 for anyone, and for large sectors it's simply a cost with no upside.
I don't see a rush to support v6... ever. We'll keep growing steadily but slowly for a while, then adoption will taper off.
But hey, I may be wrong! I'd certainly be happy if you were right. The minuscule amount of progress across almost 30 years doesn't instill confidence though.
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'd love for some way to measure how much of my network's traffic outbound and inbound is IPv6. I assume there's some way to "count" it on the router, but Mikrotik doesn't seem to expose it directly.
In addition to NextDNS I have been running a firewall app on my android phone (which also points to NextDNS) and shows all this. Good easy way to get started. ReThinkDNS is the app I am currently using because it integrates some block lists well but there is also a more serious Android firewall app I may switch to.
iirc mikrotik supports netflow. that's how i account for proto balance. FWIW, owing to the nature of residential traffic, I've typically seen high (60-70% of traffic) as v6.
This is exactly why this isn't a good way to measure ipv6 adoption. For example, youtube supports ipv6; if you spend all day watching youtube, 80%+ of your traffic will be ipv6.
PiHole is actually pretty great for this. I set up some firewall rules in OpnSense to force all devices to use PiHole as a DNS server. Then log all queries.
You can see which clients are using ipv6 and how many queries there are. I would estimate that about 60% of iPhone traffic in my household (by far the busiest devices) is ipv6. We usually use big sites though like Reddit, twitter, google, etc.
And then there’s the Rokus that don’t support ipv6 at all. Considering how cheap they were it doesn’t really surprise me.
https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
While price of ipv4 addresses are increasing, the world has slowly been adopting ipv6. From the graph above, I'd say we cross over 50% in about 2-3 years time. At some point the "dash" to adopt ipv6 starts, and brave folks will drop support for ipv4. Then it'll probably evaporate between 2030-2035.