[IgorPartola]

Nope. Everything does not work properly as you described. Yes, your devices can get online, but you cannot get to your devices. For example your Nest thermostat must connect to an external server to communicate with your phone when you are not at home. This is a bad thing, since it means that you are now relying on a third party to provide connectivity.

Also, let's say you want to connect to your Time Capsule when you are on the go. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to connect to its public static IP address directly (assuming you set your firewall to allow such connections).

Lastly, as the Internet goes IPv6 only, your IPv4 only devices will get cut off. This will happen sooner than you might imagine.

Yes, there are large swatches of unused IPv4 addresses, but the demand for new allocations is much greater. Why cling to an old system just to offset its death by a few months when we can spend the effort on making the new system work better?

[johnjac]

"IPv6 is the future and the future is NOW!" Is what has been said for years. And everyone overlooks the value that IPv4 has ala Metcalfe's Law. And that value can be further mined if we had a public market for IPv4 addresses. IPv6 is not the only solution.

Let's start admitting that IPv6 offers no (or little) present day net benefits compared to the benefit of currently connecting to all of IPv4. And let's stop with the NAT booggy man argument. NAT works well, as much as any tech works and isn't perfect. And let's stop pretending that only thing stopping a peer 2 peer utopia is the lack of globally unique address. There many economic forces in play beyond that.

(edit spelling fix)

[IgorPartola]

NAT works as well as it was designed to, but it is flawed by design. Simple things like "what is my IP" become complex thanks to it. It has it's uses, but not for consumer connections.

IPv6 does provide real world benefits, not the least of which is the simplification of allocations and a huge price drop in terms of address assignments.