I don't use IPv6 because it solves a problem that I don't have and it provides functionality that I don't want. And also because I don't understand it very well.

My points :

- I don't have a shortage of IPv4. Maybe my ISP or my VPN host do, I don't know. I have a roomy 10.0.0.0/8 to work with.

- Every host routable from anywhere on the Internet? No thanks. Maybe I've been irreparably corrupted by being behind NAT for too long but I like the idea of a gateway between my well kept garden and the jungle and my network topology being hidden.

- Stateless auto configuration. What ? No, no, I want my ducks neatly in a row, not wandering about. Again maybe my brain is rotten from years of DHCP usage but yes, I want stateful configuration and I want all devices on my network to automatically use my internal DNS server thank you very much.

- It's hard to remember IPv6 addresses. The prospect of reconfiguring all my router and firewall rules looks rather painful.

- My ISP gives me a /64, what am I supposed to do with that anyways?

- What happens if my ISP decides to change my prefix ? How do my routing rules need to change? I have no idea.

In short, so far, ignorance is bliss.

It's hard to adopt something that schools don't teach. I know someone who graduated from UCI with a CompSci degree with a specialization in networking, just before the COVID19 pandemic began. He recalled that the networking courses he took did not cover IPv6 at all, except to describe the address format (i.e. 128 bits, written as hexadecimal, colon-separated). Everything he learned about IPv6, he had to learn on his own or on the job. A standard that has been published for over two decades, heavily used for over a decade, and critical in the worldwide growth of the Internet, was treated as an afterthought by one of the premier universities in the US.

Obvious disclaimer: This is a sample size of 1, and an anecdote is not data, yada yada. I'm not involved in academia, and have no insight into the adoption of IPv6 in CompSci networking curricula on a broader level.

I don't like to admit this, but at this point honestly I think ipv6 is largely a failure, and I say this as someone that wrote a blog post for APNIC on how to turn on ipv6.

I'll get endless pushback for this, but the reality is that adoption isn't at 100%, it very closely needs to be, and there are still entire ISPs that only assign ipv4, to say nothing of routers people are buying and installing that don't have ipv6 enabled out of the box.

A much better solution here would have been an incredibly conservative "written on a napkin" change to ipv4 to expand the number of available address space. It still would have been difficult to adopt, but it would have the benefit of being a simple change to a system everyone already understands and on top of a stack that largely already exists.

I'm not proposing to abandon ipv6, but at this point I'm really not sure how we proceed here. The status quo is maintaining two separate competing protocols forever, which was not the ultimate intention.

This feels a lot like the arguing that went on during the transition to Python 3. The Python 2.7 hangers-on were so preoccupied with themselves that they didn't notice that the pool of people interested in having the argument at all was getting smaller and smaller.

Until somebody turned off the lights, that is. It is not much fun arguing with yourself in the dark.

I think that's what needed and needs to be done here. I will agree with the IPv4 advocates on one thing: IPv6 adoption has been slow in part because it doesn't work like IPv4 + kludges. That is the point. Clinging to IPv4 standard practices while you switch is just going to make you miserable.

In 2006, the hesitation to go to IPv6 made sense. Support was spotty. In 2026 it does not. IPv6 support is now more than adequate, and a clean cut will force the stragglers to get their asses in gear in a hurry ("fix your IPv6 support RFN or enjoy nobody using your product"). Change is painful, learning new stuff when you were getting by just fine on the old stuff is painful, I get it. But it will happen whether you like it or not. Why not just get it over with?

I finally made the switch to IPv6 last year, and I wouldn't go back.

The pain of change is real, but mercifully, it doesn't last. Within a year this debate will seem quaint.

> still hasn't taken over the world

Maybe not in the strict sense, but it kind of has.

In the enterprises I've worked in the past decade with IPv6 running, at least 75% of the Internet traffic is IPv6. In my discussions with other engineers managing large networks, they seem to be seeing more or less that same figure.

The problem is that virtually nobody knows IPv6. I regularly bring up IPv6 in engineers' circles and I'm often the only one who knows much about it. And so, I have doubts about it's long-term future, except for edge cases. I figure some clever scheme utilizing IPv4 and probably NAT will come around at some point.

The fact that this comments section indicates such a yawning chasm of gaps in knowledge (much less, understanding) - in a forum whose users are generally known to be more technically savvy than most - is exactly why IPv6 is still not widely adopted. There is confusion about the less obvious benefits, confusion about how it works, confusion about the dangers (how do I adjust my well honed IPv4 spidey senses?), and confusion about how I transition my current private network. An epic failure of change management.

Here’s a prediction. Linux on the desktop will have >50% penetration well before IPv6 does.

I get so many Second System Syndrome vibes off of IPv6. Surely other people must be picking it up too.

Future proofing it by jumping straight to 128 bits instead of 64. 64 would have been fine. Even with a load factor of 1:1000 by assigning semantics to ranges of IP addresses, 64 bit addressing is still enough addresses for 10 million devices per person.

If we become a galactic empire, we will have to replace the Web anyway because every interaction will have to be a standalone app or edge networking that doesn’t need to hear back from the central office for minutes, hours, days anyway. We could NAT every planet and go on forever.

Everything I know about IPv6 comes from this one blog post: https://apenwarr.ca/log/20170810. It’s from 2017, when IPv6 adoption was 17% according to https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html; today it’s close to 50%.

> For many, the decision of which protocol to use was easy because IPv6 didn't add features that represented major improvements.

This is the obvious and only key to this puzzle.

We tech nerds have this mad idea that everyone will want to spend time and money adapting to new standards because they're technically better in some abstract way, and so we do absolutely no work to create incentives for anyone to switch. Often, the new standard is not (yet) even functionally equivalent to the old one (e.g. Wayland), just to make doubly sure the switch will be as difficult and undesirable for end users as possible.

And when the absolutely inevitable consequences occur - stakeholders do not want to invest in switching to or developing for new standards that give them zero incentive to do so - there's a silly finger pointing game, as though everyone was supposed to switch, and they've failed to do so. Which is, of course, absurd. People don't owe us compliance.

Do not expect to be able to successfully shift behaviour unless you give people incentives - reasons they would want to switch, not just reasons you want them to switch.

IPv6 has already won on mobile and been gaining fast traction in IoT space with Matter. The reason IPv4 is still around everywhere else is because we came up with ingeniuous techniques that squeezed the heck out of IPv4 address space. Also, IPv4 addresses are easier to type. That's pretty much it.

I had mentioned some of that in my post: https://ssg.dev/ipv6-for-the-remotely-interested-af214dd06aa...

My ISP refuses to give you a static IPv6 prefix unless you're a business customer, despite having an "unlimited" amount of them. This results in me not bothering to set it up properly and focusing on IPv4 still.

It was doomed the moment you had to maintain two separate stacks, each with its own address, firewall rules and so on.

It should have been ipv4 with extra optional bits, so you could have the same rules and everything for both stacks.

I turn it off because it's a risk having one of either stacks malconfigured.

IPv6 should've been a superset of IPv4, as in addresses are shared, not that you have a separate IPv4 and IPv6 address for your server.

My prediction [0]: It will take roughly 100 years for IPv6 to be ubiquitous enough to shut off IPv4. That's not intended as hyperbole, if anything it's an understatement.

Because, it's not going away: You can talk all you want about how IPv6 should have been a more straightforward expansion of the address size, but this is all in the rear-view mirror at this point. IPv6 is going to be with us forever, you may as well get used to it. It's already everywhere in 5G deployments, ISP's like Comcast use it for 100% of their out-of-band management, China is making huge progress moving to it as part of their 5-year plan, India is progressing nicely in their transition, the list goes on. We're already way too far along in the transition to abandon it in favor of something else.

But it's not going to happen any quicker than we've seen, either: There's no urgency (no "must-have" use case) except for what organizations are imposing on themselves. Yeah, IPv4 addresses are more expensive, but you don't really need many of them as a business (you can get by with a small handful of public ones, and just using L7 load balancers and SNI for everything) nor as an ISP (CGNAT can get you a long way.)

So we have a situation where things are migrating very slowly, mainly only in places where it makes sense (mobile deployments, home ISP's where the users don't actually administer the network), and generally mostly for new deployments. This is a recipe for IPv4 to be around for a very, very long time. We're used to technology moving at breakneck pace, but that's only the case for the higher-level stuff. The core infrastructure like the internet protocol is likely the textbook example of slow-and-steady, and a case where it's actually not crazy to think of centuries-long timeframes for things.

[0] Barring any unforeseen black-swan events like a world war destroying all technology and having to rebuild from scratch or something. Or a competent international agreement to aggressively migrate to it (I don't know which is more likely.)

I remember 10+ years ago we were going to run out of IPv4 addresses and it was the next Y2K unless you adopted IPv6. I was able to get IPv6 for my servers and home, and I thought I was safe!

> "In fact, IPv4's continued viability is largely because IPv6 absorbed that growth pressure elsewhere – particularly in mobile, broadband, and cloud environments," he added. "In that sense, IPv6 succeeded where it was needed most, and must be regarded as a success."

Apparently it turns out IPv6 wasn't for me any way!

It kind of has. The majority of internet traffic is IPv6. The three biggest internet hub regions (USA, Europe, China) have IPv6 mandates. Most apps support IPv6. Google and Apple force them to, od they get kicked off the app store. Almost all mobile networks (which means almost all end devices) are IPv6-only, with slow inefficient tunneling for IPv4. The price of IPv4 addresses is declining.

At what point will we be allowed to say IPv6 hasn't failed? When the IPv4 internet finally switches off for good? It feels like no achievement is high enough for those who don't like IPv6 to change their minds. I would've thought making up 50% of internet traffic and 50% of end devices being on IPv6-only networks would be good Schelling points, but evidently they're not!

I've been native IPv6 at home for a few years now. That worked flawlessly until a recent Windows 11 update somehow broke IPv6 in ways that I don't entirely understand. All the other Linux and Apple and et cetera things in my house are fine, but the Win11 laptop just refuses to handle certain IPv6 ranges (specifically including the address that the host interface for one of my web servers falls in). 100% contained within the Win11 device and TBH I can't be bothered to dig into it further so I just proxy through some other device that does work. (Guessing it'll get fixed a month/year/decade or so from now.)

I agree it's not a failure, but after 3 decades it's still frustratingly annoying to use at times.

Maybe a different take, but as someone that manages a large public API that allows anonymous access, IPv6 has been a nightmare to try and enforce rate limits on. We've found different ISPs assign IPv6 addresses differently - some give a /64 to every server, some give /64 to an entire data center. It seems there is no standard and everyone just makes up what they think will work. This puts us in an awkward place where we need abuse protections, but have to invest into more complicated solutions that were needed for IPv4. Or we give up and just say if you want to use IPv6, you have to authenticate.

Does anyone have any success stories from the server side handling a situation like this? Looks like cloudflare switched to some kind of custom dynamic rate limiting based on like addresses, but it's unrealistic to expect everyone to be able to do such a thing.

I use multiple Google accounts to segregate the data that gets collected on each one - as I don't like having, say, TV logged in to the same account where I send my emails from. One of them, which I use exclusively for Gemini, was banned today (I violated no policies, Google just doesn't like the way I try to sanitize its access I guess).

Now, I can simply restart my router (or cycle airplane mode on mobile) and get a new IPv4 that probably was used by bazillion people before me, or even along with me, and get a new account. So Google has to be very careful here, with IP-linked bans in order to not just ban the whole load of unconnected people just because they used the same IPv4 as me.

With IPv6, they could just ban my entire family and any guests that might have connected to my WiFi, forever.

I like the limitations of IPv4, thank you.

I was in college when v6 was going through the RFC process. In my networking class we had to learn Netware (IPX) and v6, which have both turned out to be equally irrelevant, for different reasons. At this stage, I fully expect to retire having never deployed a single resource using v6.

I think 30 years should be much more than enough to realise the idiocy of proposing a non-backward-compatible standard to the general public.

I'm genuinely wondering if western governments (UK) will start issuing ipv6 addresses out to citizens as their digital id so they can track them online and offline.

Only half joking, some UK MPs might actually consider this a reasonable thing considering how many ipv6s there are.

Contrary to some other comments: no, IPV6 hasn't taken over the world at all.

In my case, I administrate a small server at home, where I self host many services that are made available to myself, friends and families, over the internet.

In that context, IPv6, is SADLY (please note that I have NOTHING against IPv6), a limitation, even a nightmare to use.

Some programs do not handle IPv6 at all. Game servers for instance, do not support it, the one that I think about is: Arma 3. But there are many others

In 2025 (and 2026 too?), 4G (5G?) operators do not all route over IPv6 -> which means that if your domain only has a AAAA record, some people using 4G will not be able to access ANY of your services. This issue forced me to beg my ISP to obtain an IPv4 "fullstack" as they call it.

Without that IPv4 you have to go through some kind of tunneling (like Cloudflare) -> and guess what? Cloudflare sometimes crashes (it happened super recently remember?) and in that situation -> ALL your services accessible through the tunnel are "down" for your users. Plus, it is EXTREMELY unsatisfying to rely on an external private-owned service for a selfhosting project.

In almost ALL context IPv6 is seen as optional, additional, additional configuration and is NEVER the default. NEVER. Which means: more configuration, possibly more struggle.

https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html it's still going up (we are in some sort of cyclic downturn right now that I don't understand).

Next year that chart will finally cross 50%. It was a mere 30% in 2030. Developing country mobile phone networks will continue to push it higher.

All we need to do is start having rich governments mandate IPv6, and also mandate IPv4 downtime as a punishment for those that don't comply / chaos engineering for the system as a whole. Then we can quickly finish the job.

Correct me if I'm wrong, doesn't it make you leak your IP outside local network? I'd say this is a great turn off especially nowadays when it will be used for sure for tracking

The problem with IPv6 jokes is that very few people are making them.

IPv6 is an inequality issue. Far too many luddites refuse to learn it because IPv4 works well enough for them. I think it would be a totally different story if the majority of US/European people ended up with CGNAT.

In my country, the last big _mobile_ internet provider finished its move to IPv6.

Land lines internet have been IPv6 for more than a decade.

While developping custom IPv6 internet software I am not blocked by NAT anymore, real p2p fiesta, everything works as intended.

The real challenge now is IPv6 with fixed mobile internet address (not random as it is is now, it should be device uniq). That to replace for good the phone numbers (the challenge of international roaming... which is already done for phone numbers). The idea would be to avoid a third party centralized internet account->ipv6 mapping.

I started looking at self-hosting many applications at home once I realized that IPv6 could enable me to do that securely without any complicated router/firewall configuration that would need to be maintained.

The only wrinkle I ran into is that apparently ISPs are still reluctant to give out static IPv6 prefixes to residential customers. So you still need some kind of DDNS setup, which is lame.

IPv6 continues to rumble along, gaining market share, because China. Increasing IPv6 adoption was in the 14th Five Year Plan, and about 75% of mobile in China is now IPv6.

Nothing have given me more issues than ipv6. Every time I've tried to use it, it gives me so much headache I just give up. I'm not even sure my ISP supports it. My router doesn't get an ipv6, and called my IPS. After going through 3 different people over 2 hours I just gave up. I just hope I get put behind CGNAT...

Yesterday I was required to turn on IPv6 on my router, while setting up some IoT things using Matter over Thread. Apparently that protocol uses IPv6 and doesn't work if your router is only routing IPv4.

IPv6 is already here if you're not in the US. I moved house last month and consumer ISPs don't offer a (real) IPv4 connection in my country any more; you get an IPv6 connection and your router does MAP-E if you want to send data over IPv4.

DJB understood the problem decades ago. https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html

Is there yet answer to question "how to get random self-assigned addresses into dns records, firewall rules and switch acls?" ?

IMO we need to rethink routing for IPv6 so we can finally reduce pressure on router tables and finally cause pressure to ditch IPv4. Here are some of my thoughts on that elsewhere in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46471898

But here's a more thought-out design:

- register a well-known IPv6 prefix with 20 bits reserved for AS number

- so we'd have ${well_known_prefix}:${AS_number}:${customer_prefix}:${end_entity} (not necessarily that format for display, but just for the purpose of getting the idea across here)

- have DNS servers return AAAA RRs with the AS number filled in

- DNS servers should either have the correct AS numbers filled in their zones, or possibly could subscribe to the RPKI and use the RPKI for mapping ${well_known_prefix}:${all_zero_AS}:${customer_prefix}:* to AS numbers, then fill them in (this would require live signing if using DNSSEC, which is f-i-n-e fine)

- if there are multiple AS numbers for a $customer_prefix, then return multiple AAAA RRs, or if EDNS0 indicates client support for it, one AAAA RR and N RRs of a new type that carry only the AS numbers

- update core routers to route these prefixes based on the AS number in the address

- update edge routers to replace the sender's AS number in its address if its address is below the $well_known_prefix -- this takes care of the return path

- update internal routers to use only the $customer_prefix and the $end_entity for routing for this $well_known_prefix

- end entities should ignore the AS number when receiving packets, thus allowing multi-homing (i.e., let source and destination IPv6 addresses match ${well_known_prefix}:*:${customer_prefix}:${end_entity} for socket 5-tuples)

- for backwards compatibility end entities should map these addresses back to whatever the application used in its calls to bind() and connect() (i.e., if the app found an AAAA with the AS number filled in and used it for connect(), but the ${customer_prefix} is multi-homed, then accept packets from all those homes) (apps should make sure to use TLS / QUIC for security, naturally)

- when an end-entity sees a change in AS number for a peer's address matching a socket 5-tuple then update the peer's AS number / address in the 5-tuple -- this allows for migration and better path finding

I think something like this could be deployed with relatively little effort.

I can't help but think that numbering all the devices was the wrong idea from the beginning. You don't want to talk to devices, you want to talk to (and offer) services. You probably need something like an AS number to make global routing efficient, but 32 bits would be plenty for that. A packet could be (destination AS, stream ID, encrypted( payload )) and DNS would give you a capability (destination AS, stream ID, keys) for a service. You send a packet to that stream asking to open a connection and providing a capability to reply (with a capability for the specific stream). Your network up to the AS level should have an opportunity to augment the stream IDs in whatever way is convenient for its routing. No one reveals any topology information, network neutrality and a degree of privacy is guaranteed at the protocol level, only really serious multipeer networks need to assign addresses above layer 2, and I think it would be reasonably easy to come up with an edges first incentive compatible transition plan (which is where ipv6 went wrong).

(This is of course an incomplete and poorly thought out proposal, you don't need to dogpile me about that.)

I question the premise that it’s not taking over. Our logs are at least 50% ipv6 now. A few years ago I feel like a barely saw it.

Every day I thank NAT that I don't have to memorize IPv6 addresses. I can barely manage my IPv4 numbers.

IPv6 seems to be a great fit for 1) mobile devices, 2) massive data centers and 3) literally nothing else.

I have met zero network engineers who wanted to put IP version 6 in their network. It causes all sorts of problems and presents all sorts of security risks without much benefit other than the obvious one. In the data center, NAT is a feature, not a bug.

Instead, they provision IPv6-enabled load balancers and pass traffic back to load bearing servers using ipv4 instead.

It's a classic example of "this is the next best thing everyone should use it" which achieves some adoption but it's not really the next best thing. It's not the be all end all it purports to be.

We should just admit to ourselves that we need one kind of ip stack in some situations and another in another.

NAT is the reason for IPV6 not taking over.

Also it acts as a nice security perimeter. If all IoT devices in a home were exposed to internet, It would be absolute mess.

How many people here have put IPv6 addresses into the root DNS servers for their glue records? Curious how this [1] set of charts has evolved. For some reason I have only ever used IPv4 root glue records and never really gave it much thought otherwise.

[1] - https://nlnetlabs.nl/downloads/publications/ipv6/v6rootglue....

IPv6 was obsolete by the mid-2000s, majorly due to the advent of roaming. It was designed on the rather fanciful assumption that its deployment would simply supersede IPv4, that every software/hardware vendor would cooperate, and we'd have a pure v6 network which would also replace the traditional L2/L3 layers.

Ofcourse legacy compatibility trumps all, along with the ubiquity of NATs and roaming and we're now just in the sunk-cost phase, being left saddled with a horribly bloated protocol (128-bit addresses was a marketing choice; not engineering) that solves no problems.

I love IPv6 but organizations seem to struggle with it. My ISP, for example, had issues routing it after a backend update so they decided to just turn it off. I'm now stuck on CGNAT IPv4 which results in constant captchas :/

What's up with those comments? Am I still on HackerNews or did I visit Reddit with some HackerNews theme applied?

Internet engineers pre-2000 had some idealistic, heavly mathematically proven ideas that still seem revolutionary today. Due to human nature, not everything got through, but IPv6 is the best of what we have and creating another standard would be XKCD 927.

Under every IPv6 discussion people all of sudden have the urge to manually assign numbers, need to remember their cousin's phone IP and MAC address, forget firewalls exists, argue that ISP fiddling with TCP+UDP selling it as "Internet" is a good thing or that "sender" field on the envelope is a huge privacy issue.

Evolution is the survival of good enough. IPv4 is good enough.

> but IPv6 is better

It doesn't solve any life-changing problem.

IPv6 is the poster child for the second system effect (or solution) [1].

IPv4 really only had 3 problems that anybody cared about:

1. Address space size;

2. Roaming; and

3. Reliable connectionless delivery; and

4. The problems created by the at most once delivery under TCP when what we really needed was at least once delivery in many, many cases.

Even the address space size problem is less of an issue than originally predicted because of improvements in NAT, up to and including cgNAT for cellular network providers (which also somewhat addressed (2) in a limited way).

Interestingly, some of the larger companies have networks simply too large for the 10.0.0.0/8 address space.

By "roaming" I mean maintaining a consistent connection while moving between networks.

(4) has kinda fallen on QUIC (now HTTP3) but this should really be core TCP/IP Layer 3.

You could also say that TCP congestion control is pretty outdated. It's not surprising. It was designed at a time before megabit (let alone gigabit) networks. And, more importantly, latency kills throughput. Some efforts have been made on this, such as Google's BBR [2], but other problems remain like MTU windows being too small for modern networks.

So what did IPv6 do? It only solved one problem, address space, and it did it in a way that kinda created new problems. First, the address space is too large (128 bits) and the last 64 bits are kinda reserved for the job that a 16 port used to do. And why was that? Originally, it was intended that the lower 64 bits were derived from a 48 bit MAC address (as used by Ethernet and later Wifi) but they realized this was a huge privacy problem so it never happened.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect

[2]: https://github.com/google/bbr

[2]: https://community.cisco.com/t5/networking-knowledge-base/und...

Not a counter-point, but: the other day I rebuilt my personal server, finishing by pointing the reserved IP at the new box. I then had a period of confusion because I was still seeing old content, because my browser (etc) was obviously querying the AAA record first, which I hadn't updated.

(a while ago I needed to contact support to get an IPv6 allocation at home, but that was a very quick interaction at the time)

Is there an obvious reason why it would not have worked to just say that all ipv4 addresses are ipv6 addresses with an implicit leading 96 zero bits?

and it never will, because IPv4 has become a defacto reputation system for the exact same reason that IPv6 was created: a limited supply. It wouldn't surprise me to see the continued balkanization of the internet that there is a particular underclass of exclusively IPv6 traffic, but its not going to take over everything because once decentralized systems are now in the hands of a few decisionmakers in the case of, say, email.

For anyone who thinks IPv6 is without merit, I recommend reading up on the various challenges of NAT traversal [1]. In cases where CGNAT is deployed in particular, there are scenarios where the only way to make everyday P2P connections work is to route traffic through a 3rd party - which can impact latency and bandwidth.

While IPv6 doesn’t make establishing a P2P connection trivial (there are still firewalls to contend with) - it does simplify things dramatically. And as someone who is behind CGNAT, I am very grateful for the existence of IPv6.

[1] https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works

Can't we just leapfrog to IPv7? or 8 for that matter?

Simple reason it didn't take over: the lack of backwards compatibility with ipv4. Yes, it would have marred the beauty of the new specification. But we will continue paying the price for another 30 years.

My gut is that this is for the best; I haven't fully fleshed it out but it feels like the practical goal of "decentralizing power" and e.g. ISPs and other powerful entities exploiting end users is easier in an IPv6 regime, and has been practically thwarted somewhat by IPv4.

I'm reminded of way back in the day when they wanted charge per user or per device in households.

IPv6-only is the future for mobile phones, and mobile devices are the future of the internet.

And it is consumer devices (and IoT devices) which are the most numerous and also the most price sensitive, and this is where IPv4 is disappearing first.

I don't know about anyone else's reasoning but personally IPV4 works just fine for 100% of my use cases.

I don't have anything against it per-say but I have no reason to use it either.

true. I am CSE student in third year, and just started learning about networking.

We just take the sheer amount of engineering that went to designing network protocols for granted.

I was expecting Google's IPv6 availability monitor[1] to show a crossover to a (slim) majority of their users accessing their services over IPv6 sometime soon, though it's sort of fascinating how close it gets to 50% recently without ever actually crossing over:

[1] - https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

I'd love to have ipv6. The idea every device in my network can have its own unique worldwide address is awesome.

Having said that I still want to have a router with routing rules and firewalls and a network range I can divide into separate protected networks but in reality your home ISP will most likely give you a router with a /64 address.

IPv6 is the protocol of the future. And will be.

I think this is the same as : we are a big company that does banking and payment processing for decades. We were planning to switch to golang/rust/C/python whatever for a long time but we still use age old java that has been patched several times with known security risks and no longer supported. Unless we have a huge problem we don’t see the need to fix something that is broken but not fallen apart yet.

It's reaching around 50% adoption according to Google stats? Steady growth, though still annoyingly slow. It will need a few more decades at this rate.

Solution looking for a problem is why. No value is why.

Breaks NAT privacy and the extensions do not do enough.

Top down pushed solution NOBODY WANTS.

Dual stack is a hack and binding to an interface like localhost or a single interface does not support dual stack . So your L6 code has to be modified and re tested to support L3 changes .

Even if ipv6 was just as simple , the cost of rebuild , retest and re-deploy is enough of a barrier against migration

IMHO:

And it will not be, as long as

* (S|D)NAT are not first class citizen in IPV6 Standards and Implementation * there's no mapping of the IPv4 Adresspace into the v6 space, so people can reroute stuff which is needed.

because only then, we can a) migrate b) rebuild the same structures.

because people will never let go of something.

Unfortunately, TIL that Linux doesn't use DNSv6 if DNSv4 is available ;(

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/16322

Google's ipv6 stats[0] are stuck in Dec 17.

However, extrapolation suggests the 50% mark might have finally been crossed around year end.

0. https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

I run an IPv6 only VPS as a side project to keep an eye on what doesn't work. My most recent discovery: I tried moving from `lego` to the new native ACME `nginx` support. `nginx` refuses to talk to letsencrypt on IPv6; it's not a letsencrypt flaw because it works perfectly on the same server with `lego`.

It’s all fun and games until your ISP changes your prefix and breaks all your firewall/routing rules. I tried to adopt IP6 with Spectrum internet, but every time the cable modem reboots, my prefix changes and breaks everything. No thanks.

I have noticed that on my last Windows computer (Windows 10) and my current computer (Windows 11) IPv6 works great for a little while after a reboot, but then just seems to die. I have my house and all internal automation configured for IPv6 first and its great on all my Linux computers and phones.

Matter iot devices are IPv6 only.

Apple TV, Amazon Echo/eero, Google Nest are all Thread/Matter hub.

Ikea just started to selling cheap Thread devices. It will soon be mainstream to have IPv6 devices in your home network.

My work has IPv6, and my home has IPv6.

If I need to connect to my home Fedora machine from work, a simple "ssh fed.nono.io" works just fine — I don't need to activate my Wireguard VPN; I don't need to worry about address space collisions.

I spent an excruciating 3 months or so learning about IPV6 in a college networking class circa 1994 so that I could be "current" in order to land a job right out of college.

IPv6 might not have taken over the world, but it sure seems to be getting forced on the world.

Even more than IPv4, not knowing enough about IPv6 can introduce a lot of unintended issue, consequence and even security gaps in your assumptions.

Maybe there was an IPv7 or 8 that will be more palatable.

I still don't have IPv6 at home in the middle of San Francisco with Google Fiber / Webpass and have to egress through an HE.net tunnel like it's 2002 again

> IPv6 was not backward-compatible with IPv4

I don't think there is any way it could have been.

The article itself is fairly short & fluffy.

Vs. real meat is in the comments on the Register's site.

IPv4 should have been converted directly to IPv6. Every IPv4 address should have been given an equivalent IPv6 address. 192.168.1.1 becomes 2001:00C0:00A8:0000:0000:0000:0001:0001 or 2001:00C0:00A8::0001:0001.

Roughly 40% of the Internet is IPv6. That's not taken over, and disappointing for a 30 year old standard, but it's not nothing. https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2024-10/ipv6-transition.html

I've been using IPv6 via Starlink for months now and it was a big ho-hum when I deployed it. It just works.

Haven't we been crying about the IPv4 apocalypse and the need to adopt IPv6 since the slashdot days? It's like fetch, it's not happening.

It is so disappointing to have people who allegedly work with networks and technology act like IPv6 is too much for their delicate sensibilities. From thinking it is more complex than IPv4 (it is in fact simpler), to thinking that NAT is a security measure (the firewall is and routers have an IPv6 firewall on by default), to thinking there are no benefits (the benefits are clearly there), to thinking nobody uses it (loads of mobile devices access the web via IPv6 and lots of enterprise networks are IPv6), and so on, it is anti-curiosity and anti-hacker ethos. Go ask your favorite LLM how it works if you can’t be bothered to Google it but if you start your comment with “it has no use cases” or “it is too complicated” you are just outing yourself as ignorant on this subject.

The reason being? IP proxy gateways. They obviated the need to move away from the limited address space of IPv4. Which was 90% of the reason to do IPv6.

Well, my ISP dosent support ipv6, and i get a non shared public ipv4, so no ipv6 here.

It's not a failure of IP6 but a failure of society.

We all thought the internet would become decentralized and that everyone should have an IP and a funky website. But instead social media took over, big tech and a few big discussion sites where we all must fit in a digital life and watch ads and share our data to become a good product for all the others to consume.

I really don't get why people hate on IPv6.

I'm sure someone will fuck this up for us, but IPv6 should at least in theory enable us to be rid of NAT. Anyone who has ever done NAT traversal for peer discovery is having wet dreams about that future!

people don't understand how expensive it is to support ipv6, tcam is limited and having to split it in half to support ipv6 is just not an option for a lot of businesses. Route caches exist with software routing - but for larger networks it is not an option

All those discussions are making it harder than it need to be.

I have ONE static external IPv4 for my network.

I can handle everything I want with it. And block everything I dont want my network to be.

So I just disable IPv6 on router (Mikrotik).

Not interested, not wanting it. That is it. If someone needs it, feel free to use it. I wont support double configurations on my router because of it.

I will fully and honestly admit I don't understand much about IPv6 - however, I have a question - why didn't they just add 8-32 bits to IPv4 and call it a day?

Legacy IPv4 would be trivial to support via NAT, and we wouldn't have to deal with address shortages either globally or locally. I'm sure every sysadmin/cloud person dealt with having to arrange subnets by hand, or the fallout when you just ran out of addresses and had to tear down multiple layers of routing just to make more address space.

Computers default to 64 bit integers, I don't see why this couldn't be done on the network.

the other day I had to change my node server to prefer ipv4 dns records because fly.io doesn’t support outbound ipv6 connections but defaults to a dns server that returns them

> "IPv6 wasn't about turning IPv4 off, but about ensuring the internet could continue to grow without breaking,"

Then it's failure is by design. I should not want to multiplex/bridge different versions of the network-layer protocol; and certainly not to avoid using the new protocol because the old one seems more usable and approachable.

reminder that in 2026 Microsoft GitHub(TM) still doesn't support ipv6

but if you need maximum AI slop, that's everywhere

Meh. IPv4 is used to deliver Netflix to the masses and act as a tunnel for your IPv6 network. It's not how I would have set things up, but since content delivery is the primary use case for most ISPs, they're unlikely to support v6. Contrary to the "Comcast is shit" narrative, I had a GREAT experience a couple living situations ago where I got dual stack from Comcast. It just sort of worked out of the gate and whenever I had to call the support line, I was immediately transferred to someone who knew what they were talking about because I had this exotic / non-standard service.

It's sort of interesting dude says Security and Plug-and-Play weren't available in v6 since SLAAC and IPSec are mandatory parts of the spec. But sure, AH and ESP options are never as simple as they should have been and it's not impossible to pick options for your organization that don't match what a remote organization supports. I still prefer it to the crap-shoot that is TLS ChangeCipherSpec. (Though 1.2 and 1.3 aren't as bad as the old days.)

Contrary to the narrative about your parents not being able to cope with anything technical, my mom was able to configure her mac to speak to the family VPN with no problem. Of course, my mom taught me code in Lisp in the 70s and used a Sun 3/60 as her daily driver in the late 80s, so maybe that's not the best example.

Sure. V6 didn't take over the world, but neither did SNA or IPX/SPX, though I would argue v6 is MUCH more common these days than either IBM or Novell protocols. V6 is used in the corner of the internet by people who want to use V6. Maybe there's a "those who know don't tell, those who tell don't know" narrative here. I've sort of stopped evangelizing. If the main thing you worry about is watching Netflix, MMORPGing and commenting on Reddit, you don't need V6 and it does require a different bit of knowledge than setting up V4.

#OldManYellsAtClouds

Second system effect.

Every few months I turn on IPv6 at my house. I try to use it. I find random sites just not working, random delays accessing sites, and so on. Then I switch back to IPv4 and everything works.

I used to be a network admin, so I know how to configure networks. IPv6 zealots accuse me of incorrect config, doing it wrong, etc. Maybe that is the case, but if I, a sophisticated user, can't get it working well, what chance does a non-technical person have?

My assumption is they just deal with the issues and chalk it up to "technology sucks". But I know better. I've experienced the internet when it works, and I know when it isn't working right.

I think IPv6 is better in theory, and I look forward to the day that it is in practice. But today is not that day.

i was using ipv6 at home for years but then one day at&t broke it and never fixed it

Only 30? It feels like it's been ages!

My "conspiracy theory" is IPv6's point to point connectivity is inconvenient to anyone except end users. And, rent-seekers can't extract money if the ranges aren't limited. American mind can't comprehend not rent-seeking any new invention.

Goes hand in hand with dnssec.

Aren't all the smartphones IPV6?

You and me both, IPv6.

Good enough beats better.

Is IPv6 going to see it's epitaph instead of it's takeover soon?

should be just about done by 2050 at that rate

Because NAT and VPNs are a permanent temporary fix. Before you get a global flat Internet, you have to make NAT illegal just like we did with VPNs. Good luck with that.

they should have made it backwards compatible. they were forever doomed by not make it a superset of IPv4.

Well if you think IPv6 adoption is a problem, wait until you hear ISPs offering IPv6 are providing a /64 prefix. IPv6 rollout is a mess.

I just want things to work.

I have yet to encounter a situation where I _NEED_ IPv6, or there's a very substantial benefit of using IPv6 over IPv4 beyond just "academic arguments on the internet".

And I work with IP networks all the time, as well as run LAN Parties as a business. You'd think I would have encountered at least ONE reason to give a crap about IPv6 by now.

But nope, not one reason.

IPv4 gets work done. IPv6 is just a topic that we can wax poetic about, but nothing else.

btw it's only been getting seriously deployed since 2010

ipv6's::syntax::is::weird

cuz it sucks

Except it has

For Google connecting clients it's only half the internet.

Half. The. Internet.

What a failure. /s

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what is ipv6, btw?

sudo networksetup -setv6off Wi-Fi ; sudo networksetup -setv6off Ethernet

to protect your privacy

IPv6 addresses are ugly and hard to memorize. IPv4 addresses are pretty and easier to memorize. That's about the end of the discussion as to why it's basically a failure.

I used to like the idea of an IPv4 replacement, but I've come around.

A large number of my devices and websites I visit use IPv6. Its success has highlighted the fact that I don't want it. Just today I disabled IPv6 on my router because I suspect it as a vector for tracking.

IPv6 offers nothing of value to the user. It might as well be shelved forever.

IPv6 means no more NAT. Your home computer can have the same kind of network connection to the rest of the internet as the server at the AWS data center.

ISPs do not want this.

That is all you need to know about why you can’t have IPv6.