Ipv6 Adoption: What Went Wrong With Ipv6?

IPv6 adoption:

The Internet community obviously has little interest in IPv6. Tom Coffeen presents data from a few US Internet providers that appear to indicate that IPv6 adoption is growing rapidly. According to Coffeen, Verizon’s IPv6 traffic reached 54 percent, Comcast’s 30 percent, AT&T’s 21 percent, and Time Warner Cable’s 10 percent.

These numbers seem to be a bit high for me, considering that Wikipedia states that IPv4 still accounts for 96 percent of the worldwide Internet traffic.

Anyway, the Internet traffic as such tells little about the adoption of IPv6. I don’t have statistical data, but my guess is that most of the IPv6 traffic is server-to-server or router-to-router communications, because the vast majority of end user devices still run on IPv4. Naturally, servers exchange a lot of data.

The major motivation behind IPv6 once was the alleged shortage of IPv4 addresses for end user devices. About 20 years after IPv6 was developed, all those scenarios of the Internet’s demise never happened.

What went wrong with iPv6?

The prophecies that the IP address shortage would cause the Internet’s demise were hopelessly exaggerated. Nobody seems to be really interested in the other advantages of IPv6, because higher-level protocols can step in where IPv4 falls short.

Those long IP addresses just look ugly, and managing IPv6 is much more complicated than managing IPv4. This is an important factor, because end users still have to deal with IP settings. Even in corporate environments, IPv6’s complexity means higher costs, while offering only limited benefits.

I think IPv6 was a step in the wrong direction. The slow adoption is essentially a verdict of the Internet community. In my view, low-level protocols should be as simple as possible, and high-level protocols should be responsible for complex networking tasks. Different applications, such as video and audio streaming, VOIP, web applications, etc., have different networking requirements that can be better managed at the application layer.

The extremely slow adoption of IPv6 probably means that it will never really replace IPv4. It is more likely that both protocols will be replaced with something completely new that will come more or less overnight.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t support the adoption of IPv6. I am one of those progress addicts who like change just for the sake of change. IPv6 offers few benefits, but it is better than IPv4. IPv6 is the best IP protocol we currently have, so we might as well use it.

IPv6 adoption strategy?

One thing is for sure, no organization needs an IPv6 adoption strategy as Coffeen recommends.

Does your organization understand how this might impact the services you offer? For example, is your competitor’s website available over IPv6 today, while yours isn’t?”

So I have a competitive advantage if my web server supports IPv6? Really? That is a strong claim, considering no end user devices are currently running on IPv6. In my view, such assertions are highly dubious, and FUD doesn’t really improve the reputation of the protocol or of the organizations that benefit from its adoption.

The truth is that almost no website runs on IPv6. For instance, the leading cloud provider Amazon does not even support IPv6 for its EC2 instances. If there really was a demand for IPv6 in the Internet industry, the most aggressive and forward thinking infrastructure provider would certainly support it. Microsoft also doesn’t see IPv6 support as a competitive advantage for Internet services, as Azure runs on IPv4 only.

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