Wouldn’t it involve mostly different groups of people?

IPv6 is now supported in the vast majority of operating systems and routers and firewalls. It’s now down to the carriers/ISPs to configure their networks to use it.

Ie the IPv4 issue is a programming issue, while the IPv6 issue is an administration/configuration issue.

Ie Ciscos software engineers aren’t the ones holding back your ISP from turning on IPv6. Cisco engineers aren’t toiling away adding much needed missing IPv6 features.

Unless I’ve missed something?

It's not that somebody is holding your ISP, it's that your ISP doesn't see IPv6 as something that they should bother doing (very low demand from customers).

And if that ISP happens to be one of those that decided that their core competency is marketing, and outsourced everything else, including network engineering... Well, than they view IPv6 as something expensive/risky (in project costs) in addition to useless.

> very low demand from customers

This actually pisses me off enormously.

It’s not that there’s low (or no) demand, it’s that people are not being recorded as having voiced this concern.

I can say for certain that over the last ten years when ISPs call to upsell their packages I always respond with “I’m not going to upgrade unless it gives me ipv6”. When talking to new ISPs I always ask if they support ipv6 and if not: when.

The answer is always “it’s not on the roadmap, we don’t have any people requesting this”- the follow up I usually ask is “are you going to write down anywhere that I am requesting this? Because others could say the same” and they always say that they won’t record my interest, even though it costs them an upsell or a sale.

So, I figured maybe I’m weird, maybe I am the only one. I have no way of knowing.

Except; I met someone else who also does this- we have the same ISP and they told him: “nobody has ever asked for this” which is categorically untrue since I have asked for this.

We’re being gaslit by the industry.

> It’s not that there’s low (or no) demand, it’s that people are not being recorded as having voiced this concern.

It’s worse than that. People _complain about it being on_. Look at any forums about home network or WiFi troubleshooting and switching it off on your router will often be in the ‘first, do this’ sort of answers.

Even here this often comes up. The sentiment is ‘IPv4 has to work reliably because so many people don’t have IPv6 and things need to work for them. You’re only asking for trouble by also having IPv6’. As a practical matter it’s hard to argue with, but it’s not a way to make progress…

That's because quite often ipv6 is either badly implemented, or once you have it on, it changes ipv4 to CGNAT mode (hello, Liberty Media)

How many random people do you think will answer "yes" if you ask them if they 1) know what IPv6 is, and 2) if they want it?

Yeah, maybe some ISPs should be listening to their customers more (I heard tales of ISPs in the US), but in this they're not wrong: consumer demand really is low.

I've switched between IPv6-connected and IPv4-only quite a few times over the last 20 years due to moving to different countries with different options and was a fairly "early adopter" back in the day with the tunnels XS4ALL had, and even as a technical person I can't say I ever noticed the difference.

> How many random people do you think will answer "yes" if you ask them if they 1) know what IPv6 is, and 2) if they want it?

you can ask the same question about IPv4 and get same answers.

Well, you can also ask general public whether they prefer SAE or metric fasteners, or mix thereof, in their car, and get the same blank stare in return.

But ask auto-mechanics, and hoo boy, will there be opinions.

Sure, but the argument was that there is a demand from the general public/customers, and that's clearly not the case.

Yes, exactly. People don't care if they use IP or IPX or whatnot; as long as it works. And IPv4 does work, so people don't care.

> And IPv4 does work, so people don't care

I think this elides the point really.

People don't know when an issue is because of ipv4, for a good example: network issues in online video games are often caused by being unable to NAT punch, lag can also be because connection information is relayed by some far away STUN server. Same with in-game voice chat.

Usually you need to set port forwards to make games work properly.

In the event of GCNAT a customer has no possible recourse.

But nobody understands the issue is largely because of IPv4, they just assume that's how it is, and assume the same issue would exist with IPv6

Games, audio/video calls, screen sharing - any peer-to-peer traffic is a royal pain in the back with NAT and CGNAT especially.

Larger providers (zoom, apple/facetime, twitch, ...) just set up relay servers and avoid p2p altogether - which cost money, increase latency/jitter, and decrease privacy. You can argue all of that are hidden costs of sticking to IPv4 for longer than we should have.

Furthermore, the lowest adoption tends to be in developing countries (Africa, parts of Asia and South-America), and I bet simple financial reasons are a decent part of the reason for that, if not the primary reason. The Indian government has invested quite a lot in IPv6, so it's leading in adoption rates last time I checked. This is good long-term thinking IMO, since developing countries are also the worst affected due to less addresses being assigned to them, but not every (developing) country has the means for that, and there are often other, more pressing, matters to deal with too.

Carrier-grade NAT (multiple consumers sharing the same IPv4 address) mostly averted catastrophic problems though. It's not perfect, but it works.

No disagreement there.

My point is more general. If you ever arrive at a notion which involves an attempt to reclaim v4 address space, it’s a specious conclusion and you need to refactor your premise.

A better use of your time and attention will be identifying what, within your scope of influence, can be done to further the reach of global v6 routing.

For a lot of people involved in the making of networking equipment, there is no scope of influence over increasing the global reach of IPv6. Maybe the documentation and sales folk.

I agree it’s more important that IPv6 rolls out faster and is more widely adopted today.

But as to your original claim “ Any effort that may be applied to reclaiming v4 address space will always be better directed to expanding global v6 connectivity.” is a false dichotomy.