[profmonocle]

> IPv6 users now account for 45 per cent of Google visitors.

It's hard to estimate how increasing percentage of users with IPv6 access is impacting the demand for public IPv4 addresses. My instinct is "not by a lot", but it's interesting to think about.

Currently IPv6 does not allow you to simply do away with public IPv4 adderesses. On the ISP side that would mean providing a product that couldn't access a huge chunk of the web. On the hosting side that would mean providing a service that isn't available to a huge chunk of users. It's not viable.

But increasing IPv6 deployment could possibly reduce IPv4 demand. If you're an ISP and half of your customers' traffic is over IPv6, maybe you could densify your carrier-grade NAT setup, putting more users behind the same number of public IPs. If you're a large content provider and half of your users are over IPv6, maybe only half of your load balancers need public IPv4 addresses.

The question is - is any ISP or provider actually doing those things in response to increased IPv6 traffic?

[idatum]

IPv6 does allow you to have a client on any ISP to not rely on IPv4: NAT64/DNS64 is one example for a home network (my experience). There are major mobile carriers that will also disagree, and they provide an IPv6-only technical solution.

> It's hard to estimate how increasing percentage of users with IPv6 access is impacting the demand for public IPv4 addresses.

I'm more interested in this excellent point you make, about the economics. I don't think this has been thought through as well as the technology.

And can we please find additional sources other than GOOG for IPv6 adoption?

[gmuslera]

There are 2 sides of the problem. Consumers and services. Adding ipv6 from the side of services, that is something not so diverse, is easier than from the side of consumers (i.e. multiple ISPs, devices and so on).

If most if not all services are available also on IPv6, the demand for IPv4 may go down.

Services are the most forced side for using IPv4. Consumers can be behind some sort of NAT, so you can have a lot of users behind single IP addresses. But the destination, if it must be IPv4, is not so trivial.

That is the low hanging fruit of IPv6 adoption, having for all interesting services IPv6. Then ISPs will be free to do at their own rhythm their migration to v6 only. If interesting services start to be only for v6 (because they decided that public adoption was high enough, at least for their main target markets) ISPs will start to add ipv6 to their users, or provide some of the transition mechanisms like NAT46 if that is too complex/expensive because local infrastructure.

But still a lot of very used services are IPv4 only (https://whynoipv6.com/ have a recent enough list ), or worse, have faulty IPv6 implemented (i.e. AAAA records but nothing listening there or with routing problems)

[rstuart4133]

> Currently IPv6 does not allow you to simply do away with public IPv4 adderesses. On the ISP side that would mean providing a product that couldn't access a huge chunk of the web. On the hosting side that would mean providing a service that isn't available to a huge chunk of users. It's not viable.

The biggest telco (Telstra) in my country (Australia) allocates IPv6 addresses (only) to mobile phones. I'm not sure when the change over happened, because no one noticed / mentioned it. The WiFi hotspot on my WiFi phone hands out both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. Each host gets it's own /64 routable IPv6, so there is no NAT on IPv6. By Debian laptop prefers to use IPv6 when it's available, so when hotspotting to my phone I'm entirely IPv6.

I'm not sure when that happened, because I didn't notice. As far as I can tell, no one noticed.

[treffer]

These are implicit. The IPv4 space is hard money. Demand is high. So ISPs make some money having IPv4 space now.

I've definitely seen this. That's how IPv4 connectivity became an enterprise/business line feature on some ISPs.

A neglected detail about CGNAT is that it has lower the quality of IPv4 connectivity. Higher latency + more connectivity issues.

So if you offer a service then you should offer it on ipv6 due to that.

That's a really slow transition though. So I wouldn't expect this to kill off IPv4 any time soon (say 10y), but longterm it's been the trajectory already.

[foofie]

> Currently IPv6 does not allow you to simply do away with public IPv4 adderesses.

You make a great point, but I would stress that the problem is not posed by IPv6 but by major ISPs with a global presence, such as Vodafone, which unexplainably have been dragging their feet on IPv6 support.

[ghusto]

I've often wondered about this chicken and egg problem. It seems that IPv6 is only really useful once we aren't forced to also provide IPv4.