Basically what the title says. Here’s the thing: address exhaustion is a solved problem. NAT already took care of this via RFC 1631. While initially presented as a temporary fix, anyone who thinks it’s going anywhere at this point is simply wrong. Something might replace IPv4 as the default at some point, but it’s not going to be IPv6.
And then there are the downsides of IPv6:
- Not all legacy equipment likes IPv6. Yes, there’s a lot of it out there.
- “Nobody” remembers an IPv6 address. I know my IPv4 address, and I’m sure many others do too. Do you know your IPv6 address, though?
- Everything already supports IPv4
- For IPv6 to fully replace IPv4, practically everything needs to move over. De facto standards don’t change very easily. There’s a reason why QWERTY keyboards, ASCII character tables, and E-mail are still around, despite alternatives technically being “better”.
- Dealing with dual network stacks in the interim is annoying.
Sure, IPv6 is nice and all. But as an addition rather than as a replacement. I’ve disabled it by default for the past 10 years, as it tends to clutter up my ifconfig overview, and I’ve had no ill effects.
Source: Network engineer.
I have actually found IPv6 simpler to set up and manage than I thought it would be. As I run at least one or two internet facing services from my home network, which I cannot do with IPv4 because my ISP is fully CGNAT. I even successfully set up my own static IPv6 address on my server so that I can just point my domain name at it and then anything I need I can just hit my domain and it will give the IP address instead of me having to remember it.
Granted I have very simple requirements, so It does seem pretty easy, except
- there are still too many devices that don’t support it
- too many ISPs don’t support it, including mine
So switching to IPv6 means running dual stack and setting up a tunnel, and I probably need to relearn firewalls. I’m not sure any of those are very difficult but it’s enough, especially since there’s no clear win here
If Matter-Thread ever gets off the ground that would help: most of my newer IPv4-only devices are home automation so switching to an IPv6-based protocol should finally make that happen
