Absolutely not. Routers, OSes and applications still have much better support for IPv4 than IPv6.
Replacing large routers, fighting bugs and running pure IPv6 on internal networks is very expensive.
Also I'm not talking about routers worth 50 euro/$, but DC and carrier grade, worth 500K euro/$
ISPs and many enterprise sized orgs have been running v6 for a long time, so it's not like it's a checkbox feature that hasn't had a lot of testing.
Of course they do. They are hugely complex systems and troubleshooting and tuning is prioritized based on customers needs.
I’m also going to humor you on the IPv6-only thing. Can you actually point to a single ISP that is even considering IPv6-only?
Of course, IPv6 has problems in some parts of the world. IPv6-only usually means, there is IPv4 on some central gateway but your clients don't get any IPv4 assigned. There is a number of really big networks doing just that e.g. most of the mobile operators in the USA.
[0] https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2020/10111/ [1] https://developer.apple.com/support/ipv6/
Without any hard data and like-to-like comparisons, the most that can be said is that IPv4 and IPv6 have different routing policies and this may attribute the differences in latency. As such what and where you test will affect your results.
That being said, Apple’s IPv6 policy is probably the best thing being done to encourage adoption.
However, they are not adopting the policy due to performance reasons, but due to necessity given who their ultimate customers are (cell phone companies).
IPv6-only as a term has been heavily abused. A truly IPv6-only network has no access to IPv4 resources. If it does, it isn’t really IPv6-only and relies upon IPv4 addresses and NAT to work.
But it doesn't stop there, you also no longer need subnet planning -- where under IPv4 it's very important whether this new subnet is 60 machines or 64 machines, in IPv6 you don't care and so nobody needs to manage that. Which translates to lower costs in your network team. Negligible when your "network team" is just the CTO doing a Google search, but significant at scale.
Your route costs fall too. Because of exhaustion (and because years ago nobody had any idea what they were doing, not having had an Internet before) IPv4 is now badly fragmented, which means a trivial route ("All the East Coast stuff") may become six or sixteen or sixty separate address blocks, but IPv6 blocks were deliberately assigned so as to reduce fragmentation, chances are "All the East Coast stuff" is one or two blocks.
As to speed, Facebook reports IPv6 is about 10% faster for them.
They did exactly what I described, they're v6-only internally and have translation at the edge for "legacy" IPv4 clients.
This is just silly. If you are an ISP then you already have an IPv4 allocation.
If you don’t then you join the waiting list and/or apply for a /24.
Once you have your allocation, RIR fees are the same regardless of IPv4 or IPv6 allocations.
> But it doesn't stop there, you also no longer need subnet planning -- where under IPv4 it's very important whether this new subnet is 60 machines or 64 machines, in IPv6 you don't care and so nobody needs to manage that. Which translates to lower costs in your network team. Negligible when your "network team" is just the CTO doing a Google search, but significant at scale.
If you believe this is in any way meaningful then I have a bridge to sell you.
> Your route costs fall too. Because of exhaustion (and because years ago nobody had any idea what they were doing, not having had an Internet before) IPv4 is now badly fragmented, which means a trivial route ("All the East Coast stuff") may become six or sixteen or sixty separate address blocks, but IPv6 blocks were deliberately assigned so as to reduce fragmentation, chances are "All the East Coast stuff" is one or two blocks.
You can’t buy smaller routers just because you deploy IPv6, so I have no idea what cost saving there are to be had here.
> As to speed, Facebook reports IPv6 is about 10% faster for them.
I fail to see how this is universally applicable to all ISPs.
> They did exactly what I described, they're v6-only internally and have translation at the edge for "legacy" IPv4 clients.
Having an IPv6 core is not the same thing as being IPv6-only.
Speaking of IPv6-only, you have yet to name even a single ISP that is even considering going IPv6-only. Cat got your tongue?
Still, while we're here:
> This is just silly. If you are an ISP then you already have an IPv4 allocation.
Due to exhaustion in fact you can't get new allocations in IPv4 in most of the developed world. If you want to expand, you're going to need to buy addresses on the open market for that sort of $40 price we talked about.
> ... Once you have your allocation, RIR fees are the same regardless of IPv4 or IPv6 allocations.
Nope. Let's take ARIN, suppose you're a large international company, hundreds of local corporate networks. With IPv4 this is quite a struggle, maybe you can get away with a /17 for which ARIN will charge you $4000 per year.
But with IPv6 this is easy, you'll qualify for their "3X-small" category with a /40 at only $250 per year, even if you choose a relatively wasteful address layout.
It gets worse! Unless you already had that /17 from years ago, chances are you had to cobble the addresses together from several distinct allocations. ARIN charges $150 per block aggregated in this way, if you need a dozen blocks that's $1800 extra because of the fragmentation. In contrast IPv6 isn't fragmented, it was deliberately allocated sparsely so it's easy to give you adjacent blocks to grow. Not that they'll need to when you're just an international company with a few hundred sub-networks, IPv6 is so wide.
As to the RIR fee thing, yeah, you are right about the ARIN thing. It differs by RIR and region, tho.
You are wrong about the allocation thing, tho. You can get new IPv4 allocations, even in ARINland, by joining the waitlist or to support a IPv6 deployment.
It's so much cheaper and faster already today that it makes sense to do v6-only internally and deliver IPv6 to the large fraction of customers who can have IPv6 and deploy a transform layer for the (gradually shrinking) class of have-nots.
Your IPv4-only competitors are spending more money to deliver a worse service. Maybe they'll wake up and realise, but the story of the past couple of decades suggests most such outfits are not too bright and when offered IPv6 on new links they'll smugly decline. Meanwhile you get to keep the difference. Your competitor thinks this service costs 86¢ per dollar revenue and you're only spending 84¢ per dollar revenue that's a lot of extra profitability.
Fighting this is a losing battle, and I imagine that decades from now somebody is going to write a book about how it was cognitively possible for "leaders" to champion an idea that couldn't possibly work, that they intellectually knew couldn't work, and all the actual evidence said wasn't working, and yet they believed in it anyway. Or that book might be about climate change denial, either way.
Eventually by the way - and 90% global is close to and even perhaps at the threshold where that's plausible for some of them - many general ISPs won't bother providing actual IPv4 networking. If you want IPv4 you're a niche customer, go find a bespoke IPv4 Internet Service Provider. If you're IPv6 capable but you want to reach an IPv4 host you'll go via a translation box automatically. As the interest in global IPv4 shrinks, the transit companies will lose interest in that service too, and eventually - decades from now - the IPv4 Internet literally goes away, the RIRs stop "managing" the now largely unused space and the residual pockets of IPv4 cease to interoperate.