[ipv6-wg] Have we failed as IPv6 Working Group?

On Sat, 5 Oct 2019, 'Job Snijders' wrote:

> I posit: the further an IP packet has to travel, the less likely it is 
> to be an IPv6 packet.

Looking at who has deployed IPv6 and how these people communicate, this is 
most likely true.

IPv6 is most common today on eyeball<->CDN traffic. Looking at what kind 
of companies have deployed IPv6 to eyeballs, this is mostly larger ISPs. 
So we have a subset of ISPs and a subset of CDNs that both have deployed 
IPv6, and both these subsets tend to communicate over direct 
interconnections so these stats are not public.

A lot of the organisations that were eager to deploy IPv6 have done so. 
Large companies with significant engineering resources that had to fight 
uphill to get evertthing to work. The organisations deploying IPv6 now 
might be less eager, but they will also have less struggle. A significant 
amount of development work to support IPv6 has been done already. It's 
still non-trivial work, but it should be easier than before.

I also note clustering. Lots of companies are "followers". They will not 
be the first one to do something, but instead will copy someone else. In 
some countries there is lots of IPv6, and in others there isn't. I see the 
same way with DNSSEC validation and other technologies.

The good thing now is that it's not useless to deploy IPv6. As soon as you 
turn on IPv6 to eyeballs, you get significant IPv6 traffic. I've heard 
people mention 50-70%, which is what my household also is at (mostly 
streaming video from CDNs).

I don't think IPv6 has failed, I just think it's going to take a long 
time, and especially the last 10% is going to take a really really long 
time. Decades.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se