Re:Enabling IPv6 support for GitHub Pages
by xxpor on Thursday September 30, 2021 @11:10PM
(#28714042)
Someone pointed out recently on NANOG the thing that probably killed a TON of IPv6 momentum was when they missed the deadline to get it included in Windows 95. Approximately no one was on the internet before then.
(Yes yes you nerds were, but most people weren't)
Seems pretty far fetched to me that there would have ever been a chance to have IPv6 in Win9x. For comparison, afain FreeBSD was the forerunner with IPv6 support, and they got it in 2000. So I'd say they "missed the deadline" by 5+ years. It was probably around 2005 when we realistically had somewhat usable IPv6 support at base OS level.
Another thing you can see from Google IPv6 charts that before 2011 IPv6 adoption was near zero. This matches pretty well with IPv4 exhaustion; IANA pool was exhausted in 2011, and APNIC followed later that year. Before that anyone could get IPv4 address pretty liberally, so there was very little reason to think about IPv6. Especially in western world (RIPE/ARIN) where consumption was slower than e.g. APNIC; notably ARIN reached exhaustion only in 2015.
https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
In summary, I feel that having third of internet become ipv6 in about a decade seems pretty decent result, considering how complex and especially diverse internet is.