| The anticipated order of events goes something like this: Firstly the islands of IPv6 grow until they begin to dwarf the supposed generally interoperable ocean of IPv4. Big home ISPs, major CDNs, bulk hosts, AWS, and so on. Somewhere around this time you'd start to see events reported where "the Internet" was down for lots of people but it was the IPv4 Internet, which they are increasingly not using so they didn't actually notice. "Your Internet was down" "No it wasn't, I was on Facebook all afternoon" "Right yeah, but other than Facebook" "I watched a movie on Netflix" "OK, other than Facebook and Netflix" "I got a mail from Jeremy on GMail" "OK, other than Facebook and Netflix and GMail" "Not much of an Internet". Happy Eyeballs, the algorithm that allowed IPv6 to be deployed in dual stack environment successfully, now allows IPv4 to ramp down imperceptibly. Now, with the "ocean" so small, increasingly medium sized operators ignore it entirely, opting just to maintain translators at the edge of the IPv4 Internet, maybe your ISP does this, and you can't get "real" IPv4 addresses, although many of you already don't so this wouldn't be a change. The last major steps taken by "the Internet" look like this: The tier one providers who by that point are also more or less the global telecommunications companies, begin to deprecate IPv4 service, seeing it as a niche product that can better be serviced by specialists in your locale. Increasingly the only practical route from one IPv4 address to another IPv4 address is via two translators and IPv6. The RIRs discontinue management of the namespace/ numberspace for IPv4 and so the allocation of IPv4 addresses ceases to be globally co-ordinated. The IPv4 Internet no longer formally exists, just many islands of legacy IPv4 in an IPv6 ocean which happen to have mostly discontiguous addressing. |