nanog mailing list archives

Re: V6 still not supported


From: Joe Maimon <jmaimon () jmaimon com>
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2022 19:43:18 -0500



bzs () theworld com wrote:
I could offer a more philosophical assessment of IPv6 deployment.

Perhaps we're there, we're doing fine. This is how it is going to go.

It's out there, it works (glitches aside), those who want it use it
tho they can't force others to use it so still need to maintain a
dual-stack if that's of importance to them. Perhaps that's a
reasonable complaint, the cost and effort of accommodating those who
haven't deployed IPv6.

If this rather healthy viewpoint was more generally pervasive IPv4 efforts would not be met with such hysteria.

Maybe it will take 50 years (we're easily half-way there.)

Put another way, by what objective measure is IPv6 deployment seen as
failing? Other than individuals' impatience. Was there a generally
agreed upon timeline which wasn't lived up to, for example?
As a protocol and product, IPv6 is a success. It works, its deployed, its utilized.

As the cure and solution to address scarcity experienced by network users and operators, it has already failed in that goal, repetitively and continually.

It was supposed to do that using the additional time CIDR bequeathed to IPv4. Fail.

It was supposed to do that upon IANA exhaustion. Fail.

It was supposed to do that upon RiR exhaustion. Annual Fail.

It was supposed to do that prior to commercialization and commoditization of IPv4. Fail.

It was supposed to do that before E2E on the internet became a quaint historical footnote. Fail.

IPv6 has failed the Internet.

Maybe, hopefully, this is the year or decade it finally stops being the perennial failure, but the history of fail induced net-negatives does not get erased by eventual success, and worse, the future will likely continue to contain artifacts of those failures.

Its not impossible to envision that IPv4 does not ever go away but actually gets extended in such a way that it obsoletes IPv6. The longer this drags out the less implausible it seems.

Joe



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