nanog mailing list archives

Re: V6 still not supported


From: Joe Maimon <jmaimon () jmaimon com>
Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2022 05:47:34 -0400



Owen DeLong wrote:

The goal of IPv6, IMHO, is to become the next lingua franca of the internet, eventually rendering IPv4 unnecessary 
except in small pockets of legacy support.
Hey Owen,

Indeed, having otherwise fallen short of the mark that is what remains.

I agree that has not yet been achieved.

Its encouraging that progress and momentum continues, but there is no way to be 100% confident that IPv6 has unlimited time to obtain dominance.

It was an objective to try and reach that point prior to IPv4 address shortages caused real problems, but we pretty 
well missed that target when NAT started catching on.

There were still plenty of opportunities to save the day that IPv6 global deployment missed.

I would not say that IPv6 has ben and continues to be a failure so much as IPv6 has not yet achieved its goal. Yes, it 
failed the (optimistic) objective of achieving it’s goal prior to IPv4 shortages causing real problems, but that 
happened pretty quickly and pretty early in the lifespan of IPv6 thus far (I view the popularization of NAT as being 
the first marker of real problems in IPv4 due to address shortage).

There were more mile markers than NAT on the address shortage problem route and IPv6 failed most of those as well. Some of those happened early, some not so much and there are probably more to come.

While shortage might have been the main driver of development of NAT, provider independence and abstraction was the clear motivation for end users to adopt it.


  Getting IPv6 to near ubiquitous deployment in that short time would have been an impressive accomplishment if it had 
happened.

Owen

,

20 years ago it was not considered optimistic to expect that there would no longer be threads of this nature, it was essentially treated as heretical to imagine there might be. And there were concrete consequences to that mode of group think.

Even a naysayer as myself, back in 2004 really only expected another decade or so of transition to clear dominance.

I will note that a decade to make 240/4 usable was cited as a major opposition reason to it. And other ideas.

Joe


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