Maybe you haven't checked lately but we live in a world where IPv6 adoption is over 10% (over 25% in the US) after doubling each year for the past 6 years. https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

It's on the roadmap, but so far hasn't passed QA testing.

The engineering time is going into upstream too, so ath9k, hostap, and other big networking libs are benefiting from this.

Projection:

Jan 2016 -> 10% Jan 2017 -> 20% Jan 2018 -> 40% Jan 2019 -> 80% Jan 2020 -> 100%

Seems quite good to me.

Why does IPv6 availability matter here? The amount of users that need, want or even directly benefit from IPv6 is vanishingly small.

I disagree. Directly, yes, the average user doesn't care. But application developers care; peer-to-peer protocols become a lot trickier with IPv4 due to the pervasive deployment of NAT; two machines ostensibly on the Internet can't connect to each other, requiring instead the use of STUN servers, which then requires infrastructure somewhere, or just doing it client-server, or some mix like having "supernodes" (like Skype, prior to MS tearing it out) that route traffic for NAT'd devices.

The ability to actually connect arbitrary devices, I hope, will be something that people will take advantage of. I know for many game servers I set up with siblings, the ability to not need to mess with a router's crappy "port forwarding" would be a welcome change. (Even if I had to mess w/ some local firewall, but that can perhaps be much more tightly integrated or at least, a better UX.)

Yes, but until you have the percentage of overall IPv4 usage down to less than 5%, 10%, or even being generous say 15%, developers will still have to deal with those things (NATs, STUN, TURN, etc) anyway.

IPv6 has been around for almost 20 years now, and is only recently cracking 10% (and I wonder how much of that 10+% is also dual stack). IPv4 sure as hell isn't going away in my lifetime. Who knows, maybe the lifetime of my kids too. What a mess!

Because the quicker we adopt it the better.

The shittiest of routers support it so when you get one from a major internet company you should expect that it has support for an internet protocol which has been out for 18 years.

Doesn't qualify as "inexcusable" for me, sorry.

IPv6 is important, but it's not like your ISP will lower your bill if you forego IPv4, and it's not like there are IPv6-only sites. If I recall correctly, I have to pay _extra_ for an IPv6 address.

IPv4 addresses have been more expensive than IPv6 subnets on every dedicated uplink I've gotten prices for over the last two years. In fact, an IPv6 /56 is usually free, or cheap enough to be effectively free since the fee is mainly a NRC for the time to set up the route, if you ask for it and the provider supports IPv6. In contrast, IPv4 addresses often incur a MRC based on the number of usable addresses you request.

> If I recall correctly, I have to pay _extra_ for an IPv6 address.

That's weird, here we get a /48 v6 block by default and one /32 v4 address. You'll never need more v6 addresses, but each v4 address comes at a monthly fee.

Most of my connections are over ipv6.

If this doesn't support ipv6 then it can only connect to legacy sites. Yes that's pretty much all sites today but this is inexcusable in a new product.

Well you can never upgrade to a IPv6 world if you don't add it to routers...