That's every standard protocol.
>Your point about mobile networks kind of illustrates this. There are all sorts of >weird and wonderful protocols used in the mobile world, and it doesn't matter >because 99.999% of us never have to deal with it, and the 0.001% that do have >time and space to become experts. IPv6 isn't like that -- it needs to be a >consumer grade protocol that people can understand and work with. It either fails >that test, or perhaps at best scrapes a borderline pass. We deserved better.
Wireline networks aren't any different, gobs of weird and wonderful protocols in MEF, carrier TE, DOCSIS, etc. Implementation issues drive 90% of the problems described. And don't think for a second that those kinds of issues are unique - all of this happened the same way in IPv4. It just happened so long ago that most either were not around for it, or forgot the pain. that shit box was classful in its original state. The difference now is that a bunch of people can see the sausage getting made and they don't like the ingredients, even though they've likely been eating the sausage for years.
I gave the example of mobile networks because it’s one of the few places consumer facing networks are growing rapidly and in some cases build entirely greenfield networks. And they have overwhelmingly chosen to build using ipv6 to do so.
Maybe mobile devices don't need incoming connectivity but doing a hack on a hack to save IPv4 addresses is a reflection on the genuine expertise at some of the national carriers.
When I was younger, telecom providers had all the professional expert engineering talent.
(I'm on superloop down under here, they actually have engineers and seem to have deployed a, what seems to be to me, a faultless IPV6 setup. The only issues I have found have been with toy things like pihole not behaving properly. Once I went to the Technitium thing my ipv6 experience over the last few years has been faultless.
Adoption was always going to be slow, but it never needed to be this slow. If the designers had thought a but more about usability and not done stupid stuff like making the address space contain twice as many bits as it actually needs, then we would have transitioned by now.
However now we are pumping out something like 4 ARM cores per person on the planet, per year. Clearly we will need to plan for those devices to communicate.
Also the effective address space in ipv6 is much smaller than 2^128 as the default subnet prefix is /64. So in a sense, it has already “addressed” your concern? Pun intended.
If the addresses were 64 bit instead of 128 bit the situation wouldn't be any different, beyond IPv6 would be harder to use. For humans unused bits end up hidden when written out and for machines most of the bits are used and are used in a way that make it scale and be simplified over using fewer bits. E.g. the assumption that every user subnet is a /64 instead of based on the number of devices in it is a massive simplification that hides a ton of complexity people ran into with IPv4 networks. /48 being the minimum aggregate advertisable on the internet makes the number of participants in the internet scale much better. Giving RIRs blocks of /23 leaves room to expand as assignments grow in the future - avoiding the problem we hit with IPv4. Just saying "half the bits is simpler" doesn't actually make your assumptions correct or the deployment happen any faster.
To re-iterate on this part: The problem isn't the protocol it's that there is little incentive for the average user to switch to anything else on their own volition when most didn't even really set up what they are switching from (and already working on today) anyways.
That's not to say the end user needs a more "usable" protocol so it becomes attractive to switch - that's not where the lack of attractiveness sources. The cost to use the protocol could be 0 (and IPv6 is actually extremely close to that to be honest) and there is still no incentive for consumers or businesses to make the switch yet. Even if everything goes perfect and is 100% done without any human intervention it still provides them no benefit until very recently when IPv4 prices started to rise so why would anyone have rushed to make the switch 20 years ago?
An example of this comes back to the cell carriers - they didn't go to IPv6 because they just like and have the time to do complicated things it was the simplest way to enable mobility across their networks with a large scale of devices. They hit this need much sooner than the price of a /24 went up enough for people to start caring so they pushed for their networks and phones to support this faster (on top of needing to build out a lot of new greenfield stuff anyways so why bother building greenfield with the old).
Your point about mobile networks kind of illustrates this. There are all sorts of weird and wonderful protocols used in the mobile world, and it doesn't matter because 99.999% of us never have to deal with it, and the 0.001% that do have time and space to become experts. IPv6 isn't like that -- it needs to be a consumer grade protocol that people can understand and work with. It either fails that test, or perhaps at best scrapes a borderline pass. We deserved better.