Last time we talked about IPv4 exhaustion - who owns a small percentage of the remaining addresses and why it happened. Today we are discussing the alternative - IPv6 and the reasons for its slow spread - someone says that the high cost of migration is to blame, and someone says that the technology is outdated.
Who introduces IPv6
IPv6 has been in existence since the mid-nineties - that's when the first RFCs appeared with a description of how it works (e.g., RFC 1883). Over the years, the protocol has been further developed and tested until the IPv6 Global Launch in 2012, when large ISPs started using it - among the first were AT&T, Comcast, Internode and XS4ALL.
Later they were joined by other IT companies, such as Facebook. Today, more than half of U.S. social network users work with the sixth version of the protocol. IPv6 traffic is steadily growing in Asian countries - Vietnam and Taiwan.
IPv6 is being promoted internationally at the UN. One of the organization's units last year presented a plan to switch to the sixth version of the protocol. Its authors proposed a model of migration to IPv6 and gave recommendations on how to work with prefixes for public institutions and private companies.
Materials from our blog on Habra:
- Retrospective: How IPv4 addresses have been depleted
- Dat - what is this protocol, and who uses it
- "Loves and dislikes": DNS over HTTPS
At the beginning of the year, Cisco published a report in which it was told that by 2022 IPv6-traffic will increase fourfold compared to 2019 (Fig. 9). However, despite the active support of the sixth version of the protocol, such a development seems unlikely. IPv6 spreads around the world quite slowly - today it is supported by just over 14% of sites. And there are several reasons for that.
What hinders implementation
First of all, technical difficulties. To switch to IPv6, you often need to update the hardware and configure it. In the case of a large-scale IT infrastructure, this task can be a non-trivial one. For example, the game developer SIE Worldwide Studios tried to switch to the sixth version of the protocol for seven years. Engineers were reviewing the network architecture, getting rid of NAT and optimizing firewall rules. But they failed to completely migrate to IPv6. As a result, the team decided to give up the idea and folded the project.
Secondly, the high cost of transition. Yes, there are examples in the industry where switching to IPv6 allowed the company to save money. For example, one of Australia's largest Internet service providers believed that migrating to IPv6 would be cheaper than buying additional IPv4 addresses. Even so, however, it would cost money to purchase equipment, retrain staff and renegotiate contracts with users.
As a result, migration to a new generation protocol for some companies will cost a penny. Therefore, as one of the leading engineers of one of the British Internet providers says, as long as everything will work safely on IPv4, the transition to IPv6 will definitely not happen.
Experts also note that over the past ten years, the sixth version of the protocol has already become "outdated. Engineers from Rutgers University write in their article that IPv6 (as well as its predecessor) is not suitable for work in mobile networks. When a user moves from one access point to another, the "old" handover mechanisms are responsible for switching base stations. Later on, when the number of IP addresses and mobile devices in the world increases significantly, this feature can lead to delays in reconnection.
Among other factors that slow down the transition to IPv6, experts point out a slight increase in performance of the new protocol. According to some studies, in the Asia-Pacific region, IPv4 packets are transmitted faster than IPv6 packets (p.2). In Africa or Latin America, there is no difference in data transfer speeds at all.
What are the prospects?
Despite all the difficulties, some experts are convinced that IPv6 is waiting for a "bright future". According to one of the developers of the TCP/IP protocol stack, Winton Cerf, the popularity of IPv6 really grows too slowly, but not all is lost for the protocol.
With this point of view John Kerran (John Curran), the president of American Internet registrar ARIN agrees also. He says that only large ISPs have experienced the lack of IPv4. Small companies and ordinary users have not noticed any problems so far. Therefore, it could give the wrong impression that the sixth version of the protocol was "dead". And in the near future (according to Cisco forecasts) IPv6 should speed up its distribution on the planet.