IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark

Sometimes TCP/IP is a leaky abstraction, and recently ipv6 peeked through in two separate instances:

- In a cafe wifi, I had partial connectivity. For some reason my wifi interface had an ipv6 address but no ipv4 address. As a result, some sites worked just fine but github.com (which is, incredibly, ipv4-only) didn't

- I created a ipv6-only hetzner server (because it's 2026) but ended up giving up and bought a ipv6 address because lack of ipv4 access caused too many headaches. Docker didn't work with default settings (I had to switch to host networking) and package managers fail or just hang when there's no route to the host. All of which is hard to debug and gets in your way

Outdated beliefs probably. When I talk about v6 support in our b2b saas, PM laughs and says nobody uses that shit. Big tech are massive laggards on this funnily enough.

Is there a reason why adoption has been so abysmally slow? Like surely all the big players have updated their networking equipment by now, and surely every piece of enterprise-grade kit sold in the last 20 years has supported v6.

The only arguments I've ever heard against ipv6 that made any sense are that:

1: it's hard to remember addresses, which is mayyyyybe valid for homelab enthusiast types, but for medium scale and up you ought to have a service that hands out per-machine hostnames, so the v6 address becomes merely an implementation detail that you can more or less ignore unless you're grepping logs. I have this on my home network with a whopping 15 devices, and it's easy.

and 2: with v6 you can't rely on NAT as an ersatz firewall because suddenly your printer that used to be fat dumb and happy listening on 192.168.1.42 is now accidentally globally-routable and North Korean haxors are printing black and white Kim Il Sung propaganda in your home office and using up all your toner. And while this example was clearly in jest there's a nugget of truth that if your IOT devices don't have globally-routable addresses they're a bit harder to attack, even though NAT isn't a substitute for a proper firewall.

But both of these are really only valid for DIY homelab enthusiast types. I honestly have no idea why other people resist ipv6.

> It has barely hit 50% and it's already plateauing.

That makes sense. The majority of IPv6 deployment is mobile.

The next wave of adoption requires ISPs start offering residential IPv6. Once this happens, router manufacturers will innovate around the IPv6 offering as a differentiator, making it easy to deploy by end-users. IPv6 wifi APs will then become ubiqutious and so forth across other services. Has to start with ISPs.

Apple/iOS is probably one of the biggest individual drivers of IPv6 adoption. They've been requiring that iOS apps work on IPv6-only networks for close to 10 years now