[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