why is IPv6 not so widespread? also what makes IPv6 great?
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I’m not sure of the details, but IPv4 only has a certain number of available numbers that can be assigned out, whereas IP v6 has more.
The issue is probably that older hardware literally cannot compute those extra numbers, kinda like Y2K fears about the date having too many numbers (4 versus 2).
IPv6 uses larger address space so there’s approximately one metric shit ton of more addresses to use. We have run out of available IPv4 addresses long ago, there’s A LOT more network connected devices on the planet than there are IPv4 addresses that can be given out. Though IPv6 solves this problem, it’s not so widespread because so far “patching up” IPv4 networks/systems and working around the shortage of IP addresses using a bunch of tricks has been cheaper than just switching everything over to IPv6.
IPv6 also has some built-in features that makes it easier, faster and cheaper to route packets to and from their intended destinations. It does away with some of the network processing steps that you have to use to get information from one end device to another using v4.
IPv6 is great because it has more available addresses. Like a lot more. And all of those addresses are important when everyone is running around with a tiny computer in their pocket, and all of them need a network address.
IPv6 is worse because those addresses are nearly impossible to memorize and a pain to read at all.
An IPv4 address looks like: 192.168.10.1
An IPv6 address looks like: 2001:0db8:0000:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334
If you had to setup a network for yourself, which would you choose?
Basically, we already had the solution to v4 address scarcity in Network Address Translation (NAT). That’s the technology that runs on your router that allows every device in your house to share a single public IP address. Businesses, and even very large campus networks like mine, are moving towards NAT since it will allow us to essentially have an unlimited number of private v4 addresses sharing a relatively small number of public v4 addresses.
IPv6 is great. The addresses are four times larger than v4. Enough addresses to literally assign an address to every cell in your body, for example, and still have an effectively infinite number of addresses left. It’s still coming everywhere and it’s already here in a lot of places. Comcast, for instance, is IPv6 native. At home I get v6 addresses on all my devices.
The downside is that IPv6 also modernizes a lot of other stuff in IP. Routing, especially, is very different. The security ramifications are still unclear in large installations and border firewalls still are generally incapable of handling IPv6 traffic at scale (if at all). There’s also a lot of legacy gear out there on networks that’s incompatible with IPv6.
IPv6 is widespread, mostly in mobile phone networks. If you’re on Comcast you also have an IPv6 IP. It’s overkill for private home or business networks though.
The internet allows every connected device to be discoverable using just an IP address. IPv4 allows ~4.3 billion total addresses, which is now a problem because the total number of endpoints greatly exceeds that. IPv6 fixes that problem by increasing the address space to roughly 340 trillion trillion trillion, effectively infinite for our needs.
While IPv6 is gaining more and more support, it is not widespread because we have already worked around the problems of IPv4 in other ways, and so there is no urgency to upgrade everyone. For example, ISPs will dynamically assign IP addresses to customers as needed, and take them back when they disconnect. Your home router will do something called Network Address Translation, so every device in your house will share the single public IP address that the ISP has provided you. None of these are ideal, but they work and no one wants to change everything up.
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