On Fri, 20 Jun 2025 at 01:44, Niels Bakker via NANOG <nanog@lists.nanog.org> wrote:
What if everybody thought that way? Would we ever get to a position where we could even consider turning off IPv4 altogether?
And this is, I think, what is happening. Current situation would not have been predicted by anyone involved. We weren't supposed to be mostly IPv4 but also dual-stack almost 30 years later. Because no real incentives exist for most actors. And it doesn't look like there is a driver for improvement in the horizon. It was 17 years between IPv4 and IPv6 RFC, it has been 27 years since IPv6 RFC. Current situation is an abject failure, we dropped the ball here and increased costs and reduced quality for all. I think what we need is for some big tech companies to sign a contract with each other that they start dropping IPv4 at their network edge in 2035 or so. This would then signal the market that you're going to need to deploy IPv6 and that you can do IPv6 only, because IPv4 only networks will have to figure out translation in their edges. And I think they should be motivated to do this, to get rid of the requirement of purchasing IPv4 addresses. However they probably will always be able to sink that cost in their products, and the real companies suffering from access to IPv4 spaces are competitors who never start. So it might be a good anti-competitive strategy to keep the IPv4 dream alive.
For now. While your competitors are gaining valuable experience with IPv6. And put some customers behind CGNAT, freeing up IPv4 addresses they can monetise in different ways, like sell or rent out as subnets.
Or your competitors are paying a premium to make it work. Reducing your eventual cost to migrate. Right strategy from the business case POV, in my mind, obviously has been not to adopt IPv6. IPv6 continues to be 2nd class citizen and incredibly broken, anything new deployed is much more fragile and spotty to this day for IPv6. To be a bit on topic also, I'd be curious on flow pairs share of IPv4, IPv6. If we consider all flows, no matter how fat or thin, what share of SRC-DST pairs are IPv4 and IPv6, globally. -- ++ytti