alt Hacker News> It was also predicted that the address exhaustion problem would be averted, in fact that was the purpose of v6. It failed to deliver.
It was averted: how do you think we got several billion smartphones connected to the Internet? Do you think that would have been practicable without IPv6?
Comcast—not even mobile—had to move to IPv6 on their landline ISP business because they ran out of IPv4 addresses for TR-069: they were using multiple 10/8 networks in different regions NATed to hide them from each other. IPv4 became untenable.
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mahboi • today at 4:06 PM
> how do you think we got several billion smartphones connected to the Internet
Only because of NAT. Those cellular CGNATs are v6 on the inside but v4 on the outside (well also v6 but customers need the v4 more).
NAT / CGNAT has been doing the heavy lifting extending the life of the Internet; ipv6 has done jack shit. If v6 was useful and actually averted v4 exhaustion we'd all be accessing v6 sites/addresses at this point.
Put another way, we can drop v6 completely and the Internet will still work. Obviously wouldn't work the other way around.
As for telco addressing handsets, they could use any addressing scheme to be honest. When people talk about averting address exhaustion, they're not talking about internal addressing of networks, different problem altogether.