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The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

apenwarr.ca

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Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

#4

(2017), and it should be noted that the author has updated his views since then: https://apenwarr.ca/log/20200708 ("IPv4, IPv6, and a sudden change in attitude", 2020).

And, lest anybody be misled by the title you quoted,

> No, I'm not switching sides. IPv6 is just as far away from universal adoption, or being a "good design" for our world, as it was three years ago.

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

#5
35% worldwide by population of users in random samples at APNIC:

https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6/XA

US on 50%, India on 70% and China just shy of 40% -As China continues to grow (and it will) the likely outcome is > 50% IPv6 Capable. I doubt any new Mobile deployment will be single stack, the most likely is pure IPv6 with CGN for 4. So Africa which is still in growth, the most likely outcome is dualstack preferring 6

It may not be ideal, there may be significant issues with EH for instance, but at scale its alive and kicking.

Now, if only we could get jumbogram more widely deployed. Thats older than V6 is and still struggling to break the 1500 byte MTU limit.

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

#7
>It's hard to imagine a network interface (except ppp0) without a 48-bit MAC address?

Not super common but there's Infiniband. Latter versions supported encapsulating ethernet frames (Ethernet over InfiniBand) but not all hardware supports it. Otherwise it's straight IP over IB. There must be other niche networking technology that does IP without Ethernet.

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

#9

The myth that it would have been easier to switch to a protocol that is just ip4 with more bits needs to die. The companies too cheap or lazy to adopt ipv6 would still be clinging to classic ipv4 with NAT.

ipv4 with NAT is in fact still extremely common, but skipping that, which parts of ipv6 (beyond extra bits) do you regard as essential versus which parts are over-engineered?

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

#10
post #5

35% worldwide by population of users in random samples at APNIC: https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6/XA US on 50%, India on 70% and China just shy of 40% -As China continues to grow (and it will) the likely outcome is > 50% IPv6 Capable. I doubt any new Mobile deployment will be single stack, the most likely is pure IPv6 with CGN for 4. So Africa which is still in growth, the most likely outcome is dualstack preferring…

It doesn't matter if even 98% of "the internet" is "on" IPv6. If public websites don't advertise an IPv6 address, every user is still going to use IPv4 to connect to them. All the cloud providers still prioritize IPv4, and usually don't support IPv6 at all until a few years after a new service comes out.
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