alt Hacker NewsAs sad as it makes me to admit, I don't think IPv6 is ever going to happen without government intervention. Adoption is flat at under 50% over the past year. IPv6 doesn't benefit big tech. SNI routing and NAT work pretty well for centralized platforms. AWS will gladly rent us IPv4 addresses until the end of time.
Replies
Dagger2 • today at 9:29 PM
The Internet itself is growing, so "50%" does still represent a growing number of users. Also Google's stats are missing half a billion v6 users from China.
zekica • today at 6:42 PM
SNI routing is such a bad way to do what should be L3 problem that people implemented PROXY protocol to send information about user's endpoint address without doing MITM.
> IPv6 doesn't benefit big tech.
It does, and big tech has largely adopted IPv6.
For users with IPv6, the v6 path is often less constrained than then v4 path. Serving data faster/more consistently is of benefit to big tech. For a lot of users, v4 and v6 routing are different, which is also helpful for big tech. If you have two paths to the server (and happy eyeballs or something), you have more resiliance to routing issues.
Clouds are slow on v6, but CDNs are not. Adoption on eyeball networks has been very slow, and it's unlikely to speed up much, IMHO. The benefits of v6 for ISPs are not that big for established serviced with large v4 pools. For ISPs running CGNAT, more v6 means less CGNAT and CGNAT is a lot more expensive than plain ip routing. (Doesn't mean all CGNAT providers run v6, but it's an incentive).