A /8, an example being "~rel" (one syllable names based out of a bank of 256 memorable 3-letter syllables)-- these are galaxies and are extremely rare (128 galaxies total). Then you have /16 stars which are like "~tabrel", combining two of these syllables -- their are 64,000 stars. And then finally, you have /32 planets like "~sampel-tabrel", which are 4b illion and enough to be valuable and stop spam, but are somewhat disposable kind of like a phone number.
Each one of those planets can spawn billions of /64 moons (sampel-tabrel^dambel-gabnel) which can be used for IoT or family members.This naming scheme draws a good delineation has both human understandable names and memorable addresses you can use for a lifetime -- as well as tremendous scalability to support routing between trillions of addresses.
Almost all fields in IP header have fixed size - so it doesn't really matter that you just change address size - it is already a new and incompatible protocol.
And adoption of IPv6 wasn’t so slow due to its design or any technical properties. Simply no one wanted to do additional work as long as supporting only IPv4 worked fine.
As in they didn't even seem to consider that maybe you adapt the existing IPV4 code to some form that can handle both protocols. It seemed like they wanted to force total software rewrites and hardware purchases all over the stack.
I mean look, one if-then to identify the packet type is not that bad. Or simply have the ipv4 as the first part and the wrapped packet has another 128-256 addressing bytes.
Almost all existing code that was written to handle v4 was written to handle addresses of exactly 32 bits, not addresses of arbitrary length. Longer addresses therefore required writing new code to handle them. v6 is close enough to v4 that you can write code that can handle both families, but neither the existing code or the new code was under the control of the people designing v6.
You use dual stack because it's maximally compatible with existing devices and code. There are plenty of ways to run single-stack v6 if you want to, but they all have some compatibility issue or another (and the compatibility issues stem from the way v4 was designed, not the way v6 was designed).
v6 addresses use : rather than . because they could otherwise be confused with DNS. For example, a string ending in ".be" could have been a v6 address or a subdomain of the .be ccTLD.
IP packets do start out with a version field, so your "one if-then to identify the packet type" requirement is exactly what v6 already does.
> Or simply have the ipv4 as the first part and the wrapped packet has another 128-256 addressing bytes.
You've invented 6to4. It already exists, but people seem to prefer native.
Why didn't "ipv6" simply get implemented as:
"Well, our ipv4 addresses of 4x8bit, well, we'll just switch those to 4x64bit or whatever."
Then it becomes like a gradual y2k migration. Old servers could be addressed by the new ones, and if the old ones didn't want to address the new ones, well, that was their problem. You didn't need new infra, addresses, etc, you simply upgraded the software.
Or, using NAT, the 4x64s would provide some NAT port with an 4x8bit address to respond with. As the internet switched over to 4x64 in the DNS and freed up 4x8bit addresses, they could be dedicated to the translation.
I know the ship sailed long ago, but what am I missing here? Can this still be done with some "IPv8" movement where everyone gets fed up with IPv6 hassle, and also just wrap in ipv6 addresses somehow? Why didn't the original group simply expand the size of the numbers in the address quads?
Yeah the current holders of IPV4 ranges would have gotten large segments of address space, but if there are 4x64bit, that's still several universes of per-atom addressing.
As for India, it's unsurprising a nation with a billion people and on the outside looking in of ip address governance is more gung-ho about ipv6 adoption. Plus, India is probably mostly mobile phones in terms of computing, and ipv6 was the basis of mobile phone internet infrastructure from the ground up.