[throw0101a]

> It was also predicted that the address exhaustion problem would be averted, in fact that was the purpose of v6. It failed to deliver.

It was averted: how do you think we got several billion smartphones connected to the Internet? Do you think that would have been practicable without IPv6?

Comcast—not even mobile—had to move to IPv6 on their landline ISP business because they ran out of IPv4 addresses for TR-069: they were using multiple 10/8 networks in different regions NATed to hide them from each other. IPv4 became untenable.

[commandersaki]

NAT / CGNAT has been doing the heavy lifting extending the life of the Internet; ipv6 has done jack shit. If v6 was useful and actually averted v4 exhaustion we'd all be accessing v6 sites/addresses at this point.

Put another way, we can drop v6 completely and the Internet will still work. Obviously wouldn't work the other way around.

As for telco addressing handsets, they could use any addressing scheme to be honest. When people talk about averting address exhaustion, they're not talking about internal addressing of networks, different problem altogether.

[baby_souffle]

> NAT / CGNAT has been doing the heavy lifting extending the life of the Internet; ipv6 has done jack shit. If v6 was useful and actually averted v4 exhausted we'd all be accessing v6 sites/addresses at this point.

This is factually difficult to support. (Sent from my iPad which doesn’t have an ipv4 address… to hacker news which has an ipv6 address)

[mahboi]

You've put yourself in a position where you can't access a lot of websites, including things like GitHub. That might be fine for you personally but isn't what most people do.

[baby_souffle]

> but isn't what most people do.

Most people run dual stack and as $favoriteHost gets AAAA, their traffic moves over.

My broader point was that your use of overstatement and a false dichotomy isn't _helping_ us get to a world where IPv6 is dominant.

[mahboi]

That's using v4 like the parent comment said. But anyway I don't want ipv6 to be dominant, I want them to scrap it and do something easier.

[commandersaki]

20 years too late.

[throw0101a]

> NAT / CGNAT has been doing the heavy lifting extending the life of the Internet; ipv6 has done jack shit.

Given they made the transition to IPv6 on handsets, T-Mobile US, which has 140 million subscribers, would disagree:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6oBCYHzrTA

> As for telco addressing handsets, they could use any addressing scheme to be honest. When people talk about averting address exhaustion, they're not talking about internal addressing of networks, different problem altogether.

I'm sure if T-Mobile US thought they could, they would have:

> T-Mobile in the United States was running out of IPv4 addresses and needed an IPv6 transition strategy. Their solution was 464XLAT and IPv6-only.

* https://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/2014/case-study-t-...

Similarly Comcast rolled out IPv6 because they ran out of addresses for managing their CPE modems using TR-069: they were using 10/8 multiple times over, and it was too much of a hassle so they went to IPv6 (both internally and to their customers).

[commandersaki]

You do realise that mobile usage is a subset of the Internet and the Internet is not just about end user connectivity.

But you still haven't addressed my original point, how has IPv6 averted the impending (at the time) IP exhaustion problem? As I remember it, we were running out of IP addresses, then we did run out, and CGNAT helped extend the life of the Internet for people on IP, while v6 still remains an island that is optional and doesn't help alleviate any of the pain.

TL;DR: v6 is not fit for purpose.

[throw0101a]

> You do realise that mobile usage is a subset of the Internet and the Internet is not just about end user connectivity.

I would argue that mobile usage is the primary way that many people access the Internet in their personal lives, as evidenced by fact that IPv6 usage goes up on weekends, when people are probably not browsing stuff on work laptops.

> But you still haven't addressed my original point, how has IPv6 averted the impending (at the time) IP exhaustion problem?

If T-Mobile US could not offload a lot of traffic to 'straight' IPv6 they'd need a lot more publicly accessible IPv4 addresses. As it stands now they can only have their IPv4 addresses assigned to CG-NAT boxes, but without IPv6 they'd have to have way more IPv4 to assign to handsets, or given handsets 10/8 or 100.64/10 and have may more IPv4 on their CG-NAT hardware. (They'd also need way beefier CG-NAT hardware to handle higher loads.)

See also for example Vodafone moving to IPv6 to deal with IPv4 address shortages:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CzFkvJ2Kxs

Or how Sky wouldn't have been able to create a new ISP without it because of a lack of available IPv4:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03cwFIPdgQ8

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Cg3dLR95wY

[mahboi]

> how do you think we got several billion smartphones connected to the Internet

Only because of NAT. Those cellular CGNATs are v6 on the inside but v4 on the outside (well also v6 but customers need the v4 more).