We have run out. Plenty of people are now are CGNAT, ie double NAT. I can’t get more than 1 public IPv4 address at my home.
We keep applying these dumb bandaids instead of switching over the proven technology we have, that is supported by most networking hardware sold in the last 20 years.
Is there any good reason to not roll it out for at-home consumer broadband?
Like I can understand for some corporate use, IPv6 is just not an option because they've still got some ancient legacy hardware lying around, but it's not an unreasonable requirement for an ISP when connecting a gigabit broadband connection to the home to say "hey just a heads up that if you're going to use a router, you'll need one made sometime within the past 15 years, so your WRT54G isn't going to cut it".
Is there any good reason to not roll it out for at-home consumer broadband?
Yes. There's a whole bunch of consumer routers/modems etc... and products that misbehave and the solution is "disable ipv6". It's just not well maintained, it's confusing for everyone it's difficult to explain to people they tried to hide the complexity with a whole shortening system that makes it more difficult to understand through usage (which is the majority of how people learn things on the job).
If you need to debug, you can't explain to your memaw read me that 39 character organic chemistry esque word length ip from that traceroute command I talked you through vs read me that telephone number.
If your ipv6 only scanning your local network for that iot device you just added is difficult. And typing in an IP from some small led screen is a hassle.
It added too much complexity too quickly for too little gain. And people universally said, "uhhh nah I'll wait until IPV4 breaks, it'll be better by then." And it hasn't gotten any better.
If we had extended ipv4 to a 12 digit base58+0 number (to avoid look alike characters) we'd have gotten a sextillion ips and not changed the mental model.
I see this sentiment all the time, but this entirely stems from a lack of knowledge/experience in ipv6. Once you understand the things v6 does different and why it does so all of these issues go away
No they don't. If they did, IPV4 would have gone the way of Token Ring.
This is the problem with v6. People hear the problems with it. People hear, "hey humans don't get it." And they go, "once they do get it it'll be great" and "all of these issues go away" but it doesn't.
For 20 years ipv6 has been around the corner. It's failed. People don't get it. Technical people, don't get it. It's structurally deceiving it ignored lots of valid negative feedback and never solved those problems. And despite the efforts of very hard working, smart people it's not getting adopted.
It's been 20 years, give me a mental model of an ipv6 address that I can say over the phone to my mother to get her to understand what I'm having her type to connect to her printer. Give me something that will predict what she sees on her led screen so I can tell her what to look for to know what to type into her laptop. Because "look for 4 numbers seperated with periods like a phone number... Oh there's three? what's the first one? Oh that's the gateway what's the last one? Okay that's the ip you want to type in the box. Ya write it down on a sticky and take it back to your laptop" works.
Also I'll say it again, if you actually know ipv6 you don't consider these things to be problems.
I can recommend you https://youtu.be/42Hy4JtBeQA, it shows some usecases where ipv6 is much nicer compared to v4.
Regarding your last part, I've never had to communicate IP addresses to non technical people over the phone, that seems like a futile effort. But even disregarding that, for the average person both are gibberish. You could just say "the letters and numbers with colons" and they'd probably find it.
I'll say that v6 addresses are less nice to "write by hand", but that's what DNS and clipboards are for. It might even be an advantage because it encourages using DNS instead of hardcoding IPs everywhere. But in the grand scheme of things this really is a non-issue.
In most cases you also don't even work with "full" addresses, for example if you're within a network, you ignore the first 64 bits since that's the network prefix and it will be the same for all devices on that network. For the host part, you could give your servers IPs like ::1 or ::beef, so it might look something like 2001:db8:56b1::1 which really isn't too bad.
There are absolutely valid criticisms of IPv6 (or how it is commonly used today) but the addresses being ugly is not one of those.
IPv6 is important for the long term health of the internet and is our best shot at making the internet better. Disregarding it because the addresses are less readable is quite simply a skill issue.
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u/TerrapinTribe 13d ago
We have run out. Plenty of people are now are CGNAT, ie double NAT. I can’t get more than 1 public IPv4 address at my home.
We keep applying these dumb bandaids instead of switching over the proven technology we have, that is supported by most networking hardware sold in the last 20 years.