why is IPv6 not so widespread? also what makes IPv6 great?
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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.
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