The IPv6 transition
Category: Tech matters
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I wrote an article in May 2022, asking ‘Are we there yet?’ about the transition to IPv6. At the time, I concluded the article on an optimistic note, observing that we may not be ending the transition just yet, but we are closing in. I thought at the time that we wouldn’t reach the end of this transition to IPv6 with a bang but with a whimper. A couple of years later, I’d like to revise these conclusions with some different thoughts about where we are heading and why.
The state of the transition to IPv6 within the public Internet continues to confound us. RFC 2460, the first complete specification of the IPv6 protocol, was published in December 1998, over 25 years ago. The entire point of IPv6 was to specify a successor protocol to IPv4 due to the prospect of depleting the IPv4 address pool. We depleted the pool of available IPv4 addresses more than a decade ago, yet the Internet is largely sustained through the use of IPv4. The transition to IPv6 has been underway for 25 years, and while the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses should have created a sense of urgency, we’ve been living with it for so long that we’ve become desensitized to the issue. It’s probably time to ask the question again: How much longer is this transition to IPv6 going to take?
