View In tomorrow’s world 10 years from now, Linux dominates the desktop, quantum computers control fusion reactors, and all Android phones receive regular system updates. The Internet runs on IPv6.
This kind of talk tires the IPv6 standard, Mainly because it’s true. They are serious, visionary, sober engineering types, confused and angry that IPv4 still rules the world in 2022. This is not what it should be.
IPv4 was designed by visionary visionaries more than 40 years ago to be future-proof, but the future it actually creates is beyond their dreams. IPv6 is the engineer’s answer, born out of 15 years of experience, solving IPv4’s undeniable routing, addressing, security and performance problems at an unprecedented scale.
They built IPv6 into everything a 21st century network needs. The web of the 21st century is too busy to take care of it. In the nearly 25 years since the protocol was launched, it has carried about 25 percent of global web traffic.
It hasn’t swept away everything that came before it. For those who follow these things, a by-product is 20 years of unpleasant articles — The latest heartbreaking letters are here, accusing web makers of not accepting a predetermined future. “As if they didn’t see the need,” it was a sad cry.
Well, they don’t. It’s not their fault.
IPv6 has made two very important, interrelated assumptions from the start: the world will need more than 4 billion addresses than IPv4 can support, and this plus many less important factors justifies an incompatible new stack All problems can be solved. The first is correct but irrelevant, which makes the second completely wrong.
The irrelevance of the first observation comes from the ingenuity of NAT, network address translation. It’s like a local switchboard for an extension phone: a company with 10,000 employees can only have one public phone number. If you can do it, why rip out the whole phone system and give everyone a personal number? In retrospect, relying on IP address exhaustion to implement IPv6 was doomed to fail anyway, because it meant the user base was too large to move. Making IPv6 incompatible with IPv4 will only raise the mountain higher, with the result that there are now tens of billions of IPv4 devices that need to be converted. Did not happen. Not without a good reason – more efficient routing tables aren’t.
Races don’t always go as fast. Many veteran netizens will remember the tech wars of the 1980s and 1990s, when waves of advanced computer technology tried and failed to destroy the clumsy monolith of the IBM PC architecture. It’s called Amiga Syndrome.
In the end, innovation not only failed to overcome inertia, but the rude new brutalist 8086 Evolved to take over all professions from video editing workstations to supercomputers. Incompatible equals obsolescence.
But IPv6 isn’t quite the Itanium network. There is no doubt that an IPv6-only planet would be superior, more efficient, support a wider variety of services, and have better security. The problem is, until you get there, the opposite is true. If running an IPv4 network means requiring a certain amount of resources and a specific threat environment to manage, then adding parallel IPv6 networks means adding those costs and responsibilities. It won’t give you much in return.
There are many places where it makes sense to run IPv6 as a core protocol, especially when you manage a huge asset and make the rules, but as you move towards the edge they become less sensible.
Even so, it’s not impossible: some mobile carriers have Pure IPv6 network with IPv4 translation and tunneling — despite its clutter, offers few convincing business advantages. You have to dig deep into your phone settings to determine if your carrier’s APN is pure IPv4.Do you know which UK ISPs use IPv6, which don’t and which do shuffling? You don’t care, don’t care, and shouldn’t care.
Until IPv6 brings clear advantages to end users, which means compelling services that cannot be replicated on IPv4, it can only hope that with every one of a thousand business decisions about cost vs. achieve growth.
If IPv6 fans want to change that, writing letters of unrequited love on a regular basis will only show longing pity among the rest of us.
Instead, they must build services powered by their protocol. Show what we can have if we see the need. Create the world they want – don’t give us bricks and say “you go”.
It’s cruel and unfair. This is reality. ®
