Yes — the misunderstanding is that in most cases the CPE is either fully managed by the ISP, or gets sufficient provisioning information to know whether to enable IPv6. For home networks, in most cases if the ISP enables IPv6, it simply works out of the box.
> from my home network and found, again, that IPv6 wasn't enabled.
> I, a techie
You being a techie probably configured your home network manually to some degree? It's likely your device(s) are now operating in a semi-manual mode where they don't pick up IPv6 provisioning from the ISP. Sadly, knowing and doing more results in less functionality.
> local office router/gateway; it's about 10 years old
OTOH this is in fact the main blocker to IPv6 adoption: small to medium company networks. Both outdated equipment as well as insufficient management lead to IPv6 being close to non-existent there. It costs employee/consultant/service time and/or new hardware. It's a sad state but I don't know what to do about that…
It's a 3rd party wifi router I bought on Amazon or Best Buy or whatever like millions of other people have. It's sitting in front of the ISP's modem which is in bridging mode. So many people have this configuration (or they're doing double-nat, no bridge) and have never configured anything manually.
My sense is this transition is going to take another 10+ years to get done. The big web properties where most people spend most of their time have the IPs to maintain IPv4 indefinitely, which will slow it way down. It's the smaller apps who are going to want to deploy IPv6-only who will generate consumer complaints: "I don't understand, why does Google work but this app doesn't? Why does it work from my phone when I'm out and about, or from work, but not from home?" The consumer won't exactly know who to direct these complaints to, the cause is non-obvious to most "tech support" people, and the fix is either too complex for consumers to implement or involves getting new equipment.
When I switched to my own modem and router (Arris and Ubiquiti/Unifi), I really wanted to dig in and understand IPv6 thoroughly. The modem acts as a bridge and the router gets a single /128 address, and then uses IPv6 Prefix Delegation (PD) over that link to request additional address space for clients (from a different subnet).
The Xfinity gateway only has one local network to support so it requests a single /64 PD, and then clients can use SLAAC (and optionally the privacy extensions) to acquire one or more addresses out of the /64.
When I switched to the Unifi equipment, through some trial and error I found out I could request up to a /60 from Xfinity. Some ISPs will do more, some will do less. No way to really tell, just request larger prefixes and see what you end up getting. Anyway, my /60 gave me 16x /64s to play with. It is wild that my address space is 68,719,476,736 times larger than the entire IPv4 address space.
I have a few VLANs, each of which gets assigned a /64 out of the /60, but even if I'm not using all 16 of them, Xfinity's routing table will send the entire /60 to me. So beyond my VLANs and directly-connected devices, I have the rest of the /60 to use for VMs, Kubernetes pods, etc. and I can add routes to direct that traffic to its next hop. It was a learning curve and a little unsettling that every VM or pod has a publicly routable address. But NAT != Firewall, so unsolicited inbound connections are still blocked, and not having to deal with NAT is very cool! Even though many networking people have it ingrained that private devices should have private addresses.
Deploy it dual-stack so that people on IPv6 can reach it natively, and people on IPv4 can reach it natively. More and more people have their IPv4 connections going though CGNAT or NAT64 which can be a bottleneck, so IPv6 is faster and more efficient when available.
45% of people online have working IPv6 today (according to statistics from Google). This number has been continually growing.
This is more helpful than most of the widely broadcast IPv6 adoption figures.
Percent of end-user connections with IPv6 is the figure we need most.
Then, I used test-ipv6.com from my home network and found, again, that IPv6 wasn't enabled.
From my standpoint, it doesn't matter that I, a techie, can get IPv6 working by doing one or two things. The VAST majority of people out there wouldn't know where to start. If it's not enabled in their router by default it's not getting enabled. Maybe newer devices are getting shipped with it enabled by default, I don't know. But LOTS of people have modems and routers that are going to be in the same state as mine, and best I can tell, they won't be able to reach my websites if I turn off IPv4.
If I'm misunderstanding the state of things, I would greatly appreciate it if someone could illuminate me.