So basically if Google added IPv6 support into its ranking algorithm we would get adoption virtually overnight.

No, because isps dont care about page rank. I have to operate a small isp. IPv6 solves nothing for us and just makes even more problems. The comments in here keep saying that ipv6 will fix everything but it is hogwash. It just means I have to support two things instead of one. IPv4 on the internet will not go away even if I do the ipv6 transition perfectly.

It is one of the more frustrating parts of trying to explain why we don't all just jump to do this.

That’s fair. My ISP not only doesn’t provide IPv6 but actively blocks using 6to4/6in4. They claim they don’t but I can clearly see that they do. It’s bad.

Cable modem? Some Intel Puma 6 modems have a bug, where traffic over protocol 41 (6in4) is very slow.

No modem. I have fiber with Frontier and my router (OPNSense) is connected directly to their ONT.

What problems do IPv6 cause for your small ISP?

I have an IPv6 block from ARIN. Now what?

Think of all of the hours I have to spend researching the following and implementing it:

1. Does all of the intermediate equipment support it

2. Does my IPAM support it

3. How do I even give ipv6 addresses to my ONTs?

4. How do I keep track of all of the address assignments for x months

5. Does my staff even understand how ipv6 works?

6. Does the off hours call center understand it?

7. Build the servers and add them to all of the monitoring, backups, do updates on them

8. What if I do this and the choice for ipv6 dhcp was wrong and in a year I have to redo it all

etc etc

There are no good answers for any of this that I have seen. There are sometimes 5+ options for everything to do with ipv6. How do I even weigh the pros and cons of approaches I have never used before.

Its hundreds of man hours at a minimum for no benefit other than to be ideologically on the correct side of technology. It will continue to work as it is now with absolutely no hours or risk for 10+ years at least.

I completely understand that it’s a huge amount of work. But v6 has been around for 20 years. Spread across decades the work becomes a much smaller lift.

Isn’t it incredibly expensive to get your own block?

Since we already have an ASN, its free basically. I already have one. Its at least a /32 and maybe a /28.

My upstreams support it, my ONTs support it but there isnt a nice ipv6 dhcp server with logging and a lookup interface that I have found yet. It probably exists but I don't know what it is.

IPv6 blocks are usually quite reasonably priced. You might even get them for free, if you're already paying maintenance on an IPv4 block (which are expensive to obtain these days)

That's only one side of the issue, the server side. There's also the client side to consider. Carrier-grade NAT for mobile/home use is expensive and harder to run than just giving everyone an IP address, and generally means a lower quality connection so you can't charge as much as an ISP, which is why ISPs are increasingly using IPv6. They otherwise need a lot of IP addresses!

ISPs are also making it more difficult to themselves: if there is a support for IPv6 at all, it is DS-lite, not full dual stack.

So let's say I'm willing to migrate to IPv6, but I still need IPv4 for some reason (maybe I need to do the migration with multiple independent ISPs and every single of them is traveling at different speed wrt IPv6). This approach makes it impossible for me to switch where it would be possible, I cannot drop IPv4 yet, CGNAT-ed connection is unusable, but also I cannot use IPv6 where I otherwise could.

So I stay with IPv4.