Last time about the exhaustion of IPv4 — about who owns a small share of the remaining addresses and why it happened. Today we discuss the alternative — the IPv6 protocol and the reasons for its slow adoption — some say it's the high cost of migration, while others claim the technology is already outdated.
/ CC BY-SA /
Who is implementing IPv6
IPv6 has existed since the mid-nineties — it was then that the first RFCs describing its operational mechanisms appeared (for example, ). For many years, the protocol was refined and tested until the global launch of IPv6 took place in 2012 and it began to be used by major providers — among the first were AT&T, Comcast, Internode, and XS4ALL.
Later, other IT companies joined them, such as Facebook. Today, more than half of the social network's users from the USA are using the sixth version of the protocol. IPv6 traffic is steadily increasing in Asian countries — Vietnam and Taiwan.
The promotion of IPv6 is being addressed at the international level — at the UN. One of the organization's subdivisions presented last year . Its authors proposed a migration model to IPv6 and provided recommendations for working with prefixes for government institutions and private companies.
Materials from our blog on Habr:
At the beginning of the year, Cisco , in which they stated that by 2022, IPv6 traffic would increase fourfold compared to 2019 (). However, despite the active support for the sixth version of the protocol, such a development seems unlikely. IPv6 is spreading worldwide quite slowly — to date, it is supported by of websites. And there are several reasons for that.
What hinders adoption
First of all, technical complexities. Transitioning to IPv6 often requires upgrading equipment and configuring it. In the case of large IT infrastructure, this task can be non-trivial. For example, the game development company SIE Worldwide Studios attempted to transition to the sixth version of the protocol . Engineers reviewed the network architecture, eliminated NAT, and optimized firewall rules. However, they never fully managed to migrate to IPv6. Ultimately, the team decided to abandon this idea and shelved the project.
Secondly, high transition cost. Yes, there are examples in the industry where transitioning to IPv6 has allowed a company to save money. For instance, one large Australian Internet provider , that migrating to IPv6 would be cheaper than purchasing additional IPv4 addresses. However, even in this case, funds will still need to be spent on purchasing equipment, retraining staff, and re-signing contracts with users.
As a result, migrating to the next-generation protocol can be quite costly for some companies. Therefore, as the lead engineer of one of the British Internet providers stated, as long as everything continues to function well on IPv4, there will definitely be no transition to IPv6.
/ Unsplash /
Experts also note that over the past ten years, the sixth version of the protocol has already 'become outdated'. Engineers from Rutgers University , that IPv6 (like its predecessor) is poorly suited for operation in mobile networks. When a user moves from one access point to another, the switching of base stations is handled by 'old' handover mechanisms. In the future, when the number of IP addresses and mobile devices in the world increases significantly, this feature may lead to delays during reconnection.
Among other factors hindering the transition to IPv6, experts highlight the negligible performance boost of the new protocol. According to some studies, in Asia-Pacific countries, packets are transmitted faster over IPv4 than over IPv6 (). In Africa or Latin America, there is generally no difference in data transmission speed.
What are the prospects
Despite all the difficulties, some experts believe that IPv6 has a 'bright future.' According to one of the developers of the TCP/IP protocol stack — Vinton Cerf, the popularity of IPv6 is indeed growing too slowly, but all is not lost for the protocol yet.
This viewpoint is also shared by John Curran, president of the American Internet registry ARIN. He , that the shortage of IPv4 is only felt by large internet providers. Small companies and regular users do not notice any issues yet. Therefore, it may create a misleading impression that the sixth version of the protocol has 'died'. In the near future (if we trust Cisco's forecasts), IPv6 should accelerate its spread across the planet.
What we write about in the VAS Experts corporate blog:
Source: habr.com
