[tryauuum]

I think they are not afraid, they just see 0 reasons to

without IPv6: everything works already, your customers can access any website

with IPv6: ...what are the benifits to them? they still have to provide IPv4 to customers or do some ipv6 to ipv4 translation to make sure ipv4 websites still work

(I've never worked at an ISP so my opinion might be useless)

[johncolanduoni]

There are some reasons, which is why you do see IPv6 use increasing. IPv4 exhaustion means that almost all mobile (and in some countries landline) internet connections have to access the IPv4 internet through Carrier Grade NAT. ISPs have to buy the equipment to operate these and pay for their maintenance, and they have to do so in proportion to how much traffic is stuck on the IPv4 internet. At a certain point making the necessary investments to send more traffic over IPv6 end-to-end becomes a better bet than continuing to maintain a growing CGNAT stack.

The tough part is that while ISPs can largely control whether their mobile and residential users have IPv6 available they can’t really do so for their business users, let alone arbitrary website operators they have no relationship with. So the reality is that everyone is going to have to maintain both 4to6 and 6to4 basically forever. But as it becomes less common it’ll no longer need to be especially fast or efficient and the costs to operate it will come down.

[da_chicken]

> I think they are not afraid, they just see 0 reasons to

This is a big part of it. Apart from extra addresses, it offers remarkably little benefit in terms of networking features from an operational management perspective. It sounds like it should be better when you look at the features, but, in actual operation the features don't really offer that much.

Further, there's the general problem that for some reason the network equipment manufacturers seem to think that because you don't frequently need NAT that now you don't need to have a stateful firewall just always on by default on a network edge device.

Plus the general confusion among tech neophytes that NAT itself is offering actual security features, so that a stateful firewall is a downgrade. This is such a fundamental misunderstanding that you can't even communicate with a person that believes it to be the case. I fear that this confusion will remain with us for decades. I'm sure me even mentioning it will spawn a whole thread of people vehemently disagreeing, because there is always at least one.

This is coupled with the fact that the addresses are just ugly. Like, I'm sorry, but unless you're exactly an electrical engineer, the IPv6 addressing scheme is difficult to remember. IPv4 has the same problem -- the magic numbers are only easy to remember if you have memorized the binary values, too -- but it's really only a handful of things to remember in comparison. Hex values are just not as easy to read or remember compared to decimal numbers. So even though IPv6 isn't harder to use, it feels like it's much harder to use.