* My home and small business Internet provider does not support IPv6, despite them talking about deploying it for about 10 years now. Actually here in the Netherlands I have never encountered a mainstream consumer ISP that supports IPv6.
* I don't have any users that are on exclusively on IPv6. All my users have access to IPv4.
* IPv6 does not bring me any visible benefits, like faster performance.
Instead of the numbers you type in the hostname of a device. IPv6 encourages to improve on the current lackluster DNS solutions some routers have.
Three trouble begins at internet scale where mDNS just does not work due to collisions. And ISPs do not want to give you free domain names and especially free dynamic subdomain delegation.
>And ISPs do not want to give you free domain names and especially free dynamic subdomain delegation.
Probably not but for internal resolution a .local or similar TLD is sufficient.
"Server IP address could not be found."
5 minutes later...
"Now could you please tell me the IPs of all connected devices?"
Customer hangs up and cancels his subscription.
So, with that in mind, what would be the major drawbacks to IPv6 address shorteners? You'll always have a certain class of issues such as transcription errors, of course.
If we had demand for it, I'm pretty sure we'd start including an IPv6 subnet by default. It doesn't cost us much, it's just more bookkeeping really. If anything, it could be a turn-off to our customers who might not be used to configuring their router with an IPv6 subnet (the 'ugliness' problem you're talking about, but also just unfamiliarity).
I think IPv6 adoption will happen when cloud providers start running out of IPv4 space. If AWS has to drastically raise its prices for IPs, or simply announces they're running out, then AWS customers will have to start evangelizing IPv6 to their own customer bases.
Eventually an IT guy in an office says, "I heard Slack is only going to support IPv6 soon, we need it!". So the ISPs start doing it.
it's a 128 bit number. no matter how you encode it, the ux is going to suck.
1. Just because we have 128 bits doesn't mean we have to use them all right now.
2. As anyone who's familiar with data compression knows, there are ways to represent some values in convenient forms and other values in less convenient forms.
3. There is a trade-off between ease of allocation and ease of use. Maybe we shift the focus toward ease of use if we want wide adoption.
With the benefit of hindsight, one way the IPv6 rollout could have been done differently is to have initially restricted ourselves to 40 bits of the address space. Thus we'd have started with addresses that look like (say) A.B.C.D.E instead of the current A.B.C.D.
Such a (hypothetical) system would be easy for an end user to handle, and most importantly that could be enough to get us over the hump to IPv6 adoption. Longer addresses would be valid, but they just wouldn't be assigned until later.
Of course, this is not quite how IPv6 works. But they do have a syntax that allows omitting zero values, and if addresses were assigned so that more of them were zero, it would make the UX better.
Also, thinking about it in this way, "end user" for IPv6 does not only translate to the developers working with IPv6 as consumers (think someone getting an IP from AWS for deploying their app), but, for maximum effectiveness, should also include the developers working on the implementation as well as distribution end of the technology. As always, these two (or more) groups have different levels of motivation to adopt and use the technology, and as such it is likely that the usual tradeoffs can be made (making something a bit harder to implement, for the sake of much increased "consumer" experience).
Ideally there would be a spec and an implementation that would appeal to both allocators as well as consumers of the address space.
At work, we had some problems with Windows' Network Location Awareness where a domain controller thought it was on a public/non-trusted network unless IPv6 was turned off in the network settings. So we actually had at least a little pressure not to enable v6. :-|
From a principal point of view, it is very annoying, practically it has not been sufficiently annoying for me to do anything about it.
But, you're right about IPv6 being extremely complicated. Back when I first heard about IPv6, I suspected it was going to fail in the marketplace.
it's "failing" for a number of reasons - the UI and mental map model is certainly a stumbling block, but it's also something which requires coordinated effort between multiple parties to happen more or less at the same time. If it doesn't (and it didn't), it'll take years more for all players to get in sync, which is what we're seeing.
Residential ISP companies didn't have much incentive to upgrade when everyone's OS didn't include IPv6 stack. Not much push to try to upgrade your OS when your modem and ISP don't support it. Not much use to try to support it on your websites and email servers when no one is using it or asking for it.... and so on.
As all the pieces fall in to place - hardware, ISP, OS, web/mail/services - it'll still be a gradual move, unless some major players announce IPv6 only service. If Office365 was "IPv6 only in 2020", that might motivate a lot of orgs to push their IT/ISP to upgrade and migrate.
It doesn't even need to be that drastic. Apple, Google, and Microsoft could just check for IPv6 when connecting to a network. If it's missing, display some kind of alert saying, "This internet connection is malfunctioning, please contact (lookup service number based on the IP address.)"
Constantly showing that nag will put a lot of pressure on major ISPs like Comcast.
Comcast is making good progress: http://www.worldipv6launch.org/apps/ipv6week/measurement/ima...
For others, see: http://www.worldipv6launch.org/measurements/
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Who here actually feels any sort of pain, as an internet technologist, or as business owner, from "still" being on IPv4? I know that I do not.