back to article IPv6 still 5-10 years away from mainstream use, but K8s networking and multi-cloud are now real

IPv6 is still five to ten years away from ascending to analyst firm Gartner’s plateau of productivity, and remains a technology employed by only “early mainstream” users. So says the firm’s 2021 Hype Cycle for Enterprise Networking, published last week and now grasped in The Register’s claws. Let’s start with the graphic …

  1. tip pc Silver badge

    Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

    For the first time ever I find myself agreeing with most of that.

    Maybe I’m ready for management after all?

    SDN is just companies flogging stuff that sits in the way and does vxlan.

    Private 5G & 5G will be a game changer

    ipv6 has little benefit for most people

    Intent based networking is a noble effort but Zero trust is the way forward.

    I personally feel private wan circuits are more secure than wan over internet but zero trust is there for that.

    1. Fred Daggy Silver badge
      Meh

      Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

      IPv6 has lost the war. It will never see serious use. For the average sysadmin punter, what are the real, day to day problems that IPv4 has? The biggest by far is publicly routable IPv4 exhaustion. Solve that one, with backwards compatibility, and you have a winner.

      Of course, incentivising/forcing organisations with Class A and B addresses that they use internally and never see the light of day, to release those addresses, is probably going to be a better short term winner.

      1. tip pc Silver badge

        Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

        “ IPv6 has lost the war. It will never see serious use.”

        I largely concur but ipv6 is being used seriously by some, iirc some mobile carriers are ipv6 native.

        It’s difficult when only some sites and users are ipv6 and some mechanism is needed to choose between the 2.

        I’m on VM and Apples iCloud private relay will show me as having an ipv4 & ipv6 address (private relays job is to obfuscate my real ip), clicking google search links often fail unless I search from ipv4.google.com.

        Security wise it’s probably a good idea to use ipv6 internally with ipv4 only internet connections. It’s an additional layer miscreants need to hop through!

      2. Phones Sheridan Silver badge

        Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

        The only use for IPV6 is large infrastructure, i.e. Telco. "The internet" is what Average Joe uses. That is mostly an IPV4 affair, and will remain so as long as that's where the majority of Average Joes hang out. Anyone creating an IPV6 only website will be shooting themselves in the foot commercially because most of their customers are IPV4 only.

        1. Peter2 Silver badge

          Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

          Anyone creating an IPV6 only website will be shooting themselves in the foot commercially because most of their customers are IPV4 only

          Given that you have have thousands of websites on a server cluster behind a single IPv4 address there is no particular reason to ever end up in this situation.

          1. Yes Me Silver badge
            Thumb Down

            Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

            Um, yes, there are tricks you can play but address sharing at that rate is expensive and unreliable, and that's why the serious large-scale service providers support both IPv4 and IPv6. Do you think that Google supports IPv6 as a vanity project? Or Cloudflare? Or any of the large scale cloud providers and CDNs?

            1. Peter2 Silver badge

              Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

              *tricks*?!

              Every web server on the face of the planet serves a different website depending on the domain name in the GET request as a core competence.

              1. Hubert Cumberdale Silver badge
                Coat

                Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

                "Every web server on the face of the planet..."

                Reductio ad absurdum: my home web server doesn't. Thus it must be in spaaaaace. QED ∎

        2. mark l 2 Silver badge

          Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

          I have a cheap VPS which only supports IPv6 but you can still host a website that is accessible from IP4 only clients using Cloudflare proxying. You don't even need to have a paid Cloudflare plan its included in their free tier.

        3. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          "The only use for IPV6 is large infrastructure"

          The Internet is not a large infrastructure? Actually it's exactly on the internet facing side of networks that IPv4 addresses have run out.

          On a private infrastructure a 10/8 class is probably enough but for the largest of them. As I wrote in another post, Average Joe may get an IPv6 network sooner than it expects (many already have on their mobes).

        4. Charlie Clark Silver badge
          Stop

          Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

          ISPs here are rolling out IPv6 as standard. What you run on your LAN is largely irrelevant as long as your IX does IPv6.

        5. Yes Me Silver badge
          Happy

          Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

          All the usual misconceptions about IPv6 here, I see. But in the real world, its growth continues (35% of all users now at the weekend, 33% midweek, according to Google). So yes, large telcos are switching more and more users to IPv6 because it's cheaper and more reliable than Carrier Grade NAT. Enterprise deployment is going more slowly but IPv4 growth is over and it's rapidly becoming a legacy technology.

          BTW it's no accident that IPv4 and IPv6 can coexist and that IPv6 now absorbs the growth. It was designed to be like that.

      3. Peter2 Silver badge

        Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

        Decades on, I still think that the winning solution would have been just to add another two numbers to the scheme used by IPv4 and leave everything else alone. It'd easily have hit 100% utilisation by now because everybody would have switched to it without hesitation.

        This would take you from 4.1 billion addresses to two hundred sixty eight point eight trillion addresses, with the point eight at the end being two hundred times larger than the existing IPv4 address block.

        1. Warm Braw

          Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

          And, decades on, I shouldn't have to be repeating this...

          It really doesn't matter how many digits you add. Simply adding a single bit makes half the potential new address space unreachable to "legacy" systems and that moves you no further forward unless you have a credible plan EITHER for ongoing interoperability (using some form of address translation) OR to migrate the legacy systems before the additional address space is required.

          It was envisaged with IPv6 that the revised protocol stacks would be in place everywhere before the address space ran out (courtesy of CIDR-based life-extension) and indeed that largely happened in terms of end systems (most of which have been IPv6-capable for years) - and in core networks - but retail ISPs largely stuck with what they knew. I banged on about interoperability for some time and gave up because there was a complete lack of mutual understanding between people designing protocols and people deploying networks (faults on both sides). So without either interoperability or prompt migration, IPv6 uptake has been dismal.

          But that would have been true however many extra digits the addresses had.

          1. katrinab Silver badge

            Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

            Sure, but all you had to do to migrate to the new standard was allocate a bit more memory for the address, I think people would have done it by now. IPv6 requires you to completely redesign your network topology.

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

              >Sure, but all you had to do to migrate to the new standard was

              >allocate a bit more memory for the address,

              Yeah, great but it doesn't work like that does it. "just making the addresses longer" breaks everything on the same level as IPv6 does. If you have to break everything you might as well try to fix existing issues with IPv4.

              Do people here seriously think you can just add 2 bytes to IPv4 addresses and it would just work?

              1. Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

                Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

                It's almost exactly what's happened, though. The 2 port bytes are now part of the address.

                And I think the original point was an incompatible new header would have become mainstream by now if the protocol looked and behaved much more like IPv4.

                1. Anonymous Coward
                  Anonymous Coward

                  Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

                  >It's almost exactly what's happened, though. The 2 port bytes are now part of the address.

                  And you don't think that's a really shitty and error prone solution? Doing this has broken the original intention of ports, means you need a bunch of crappy state tracking logic at the gateways...

                  I would go as far to say that NAT is part of the reason we have insane stuff like almost everything developed in the last 10 years being some crappy hack that encapsulates data over HTTPS or does the HTTPS setup and then hijacks the socket.

              2. katrinab Silver badge
                Flame

                Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

                It is the "fix existing issues with IPv4" bit that is causing the problem.

                Propoents of IPv6 think that not being able to access every single device in my home or office without first setting up a VPN / Port Forwarding / Reverse Proxy / whatever, is an issue that needs to be solved.

                Normal people don't think this is a problem, they think it is a good thing.

                And yes, I know you can have VPNs / Port Forwarding / Reverse Proxy / etc under IPv6.

                1. Anonymous Coward
                  Anonymous Coward

                  Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

                  >Propoents of IPv6 think that not being able to access every single device in

                  >my home or office without first setting up a VPN / Port Forwarding / Reverse

                  >Proxy / whatever, is an issue that needs to be solved.

                  Maybe some people don't want to have to resort to crappy crap-over-crap routing hacks to do anything and aren't silly enough to think that NAT actually hides their network from the internet/are capable of setting up their gateways to actually work properly.

                  1. katrinab Silver badge
                    Flame

                    Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

                    And this response is a perfect demonstration of my point.

                    1. Anonymous Coward
                      Anonymous Coward

                      Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

                      >>And this response is a perfect demonstration of my point.

                      Ok ok I get it. Everyone should suffer having to pay huge amounts of money to get a single IP or suffer sharing an IP with tons of other people with some hacky port based multiplexing system because *you* don't want to fix your setup.

                      Anyhow, please add 2 bytes to IP addresses in the structs of your TCP/IP stack, rebuild it and see how that works out.

                    2. Yes Me Silver badge

                      Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

                      "And this response is a perfect demonstration of my point."

                      You're not getting it. Of course we need secure solutions to protect resources from unwanted/malicious traffic. Nothing in IPv6 affects that. With an IPv6 router as my interface to the Internet, I have to change firewall settings to allow incoming traffic. There isn't a single respect in which IPv6 reduces my protection. It just avoids the complexity of address translation, which has nothing to do with security.

                  2. Alan Brown Silver badge

                    Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

                    What's worse is NAT behind NAT (behind NAT)

                    NAT breaks things. Double (or more) NAT utterly screws the pooch for just about everything other than web access and it's widespread across the world

                2. Anonymous Coward
                  Anonymous Coward

                  Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

                  Talk to any gamer and their endless fight with NAT... is UPnP better than IPv6 and proper firewall rules?

                  Moreover what is better? Control your IoT stuff from someone else's computer (the "cloud consoles"), or access your network directly with the proper authentication and ACLs in place? Setting up a VPN is easier with IPv6 - which, if the ISP is not scroogey - means you have a static prefix directly accessible, and not a dynamic IP, or worse, a router hidden behind some kind of CG-NAT that makes accessing it from outside much more complex.

              3. Alan Brown Silver badge

                Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

                "If you have to break everything you might as well try to fix existing issues with IPv4."

                AND, if you're going to break everything, it's better to only break it ONCE, rather than have to redo the whole exercise again in 15 years' time

            2. Warm Braw

              Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

              allocate a bit more memory for the address

              Really. No.

              There is nowhere to put the extra address in an IPv4 packet and no IPv4 implementation would know what to do with it if there were. Your existing IPv4 systems therefore simply cannot form a fully intercommunicating network with hypothetical IPv4++ systems. That's the fundamental problem and it's the same problem however much or little "more" memory you choose to allocate or what other additional tweaks you might make at the same time.

              Yes there's a large amount of additional stuff around discovery in particular that makes IPv6 a rather different beast, but that's effectively just window dressing.

              Proprietary networks vanished remarkably quickly - completely changing protocols as well as topology - when (relatively) cheap IP-based routers and faster digital circuits came along. Protocol minutiae don't drive behaviour. There's simply an absence of compelling reason because in the absence of dealing with the fundamental problem, other solutions (such as CGNAT) are not obviously worse.

            3. Arthur the cat Silver badge
              WTF?

              Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

              IPv6 requires you to completely redesign your network topology.

              It didn't when I switched on IPv6 internally. OK, my network is small enough that I have the subnet number in the 3rd byte of a v4 address and the host in the 4th, but that simply mapped to the subnet number being in the 16 bit suffix appended to the /48 network address and the host being the bottom 16 bits. I.e. 10.0.s.h → ${pfx48}:s::h

          2. Fred Daggy Silver badge
            Coat

            Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

            "Legacy" - ie IPv4 addresses, are just a special case of the IPvNext space. Pad with zeros or all '1'. Ok Zeros might lead to crashing poorly coded stacks, probably coded in C

            Well coded IP'v4 could, theoretically, be turned in to IPvNext by just increasing the address space, compiling and testing. But in the real world a whole lot 'oh shit, that just won't work' because of the way xyz was coded.

        2. tip pc Silver badge

          Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

          for efficiency reasons you want the addresses to be in powers of 2

          if you have 4 bytes = 32 bits to process

          8 bit computer takes 4 cycles

          16 bits = 2

          32 bits = 1

          64 bits = 1

          if you have 6 bytes = 48 bits to process

          8 bits = 6 cycles

          16 bits = 3

          32 bits = 2

          64 bits = 1

          on a 32 bit system you may as well have gone for an 8 byte / 64 bit address as it'll take the same amount of time to process, a 64 bit system could process 2 32 bit addresses or 1 64 bit in the same time as 1 48 bit address.

          when you must process lots of packets in a short time using cheap cpu's you don't want to be wasting effort.

        3. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

          >>Decades on, I still think that the winning solution would have been just to

          >>add another two numbers to the scheme used by IPv4

          You realise IP addresses aren't strings right? 192.168.0.1 is not encoded on the wire as a variable length string and it isn't four numbers as you seem to think. An IP address is exactly one number and that number has to be 32bits wide because everything that speaks IPv4 expects 32bits of address in the 32bit space there is for an address. You can't "just add two numbers" because there is nowhere to put them and nothing that speaks IPv4 cares about anything but the 32bit address.

          So you either need to:

          - Develop a new protocol which everything needs to get upgraded or replaced to support. You need to do it decades before the existing protocol is unworkable and as everything needs to be upgraded anyway you should probably at least try to design something that doesn't need to be ripped out again just as it's been widely accepted.. basically the plan for IPv6

          - Create address namespaces with gateways that can translate between different IPv4 namespaces like NAT does and hope it's not a complete shit show with people hoarding huge amounts of the "global namespace" so they can keep their stuff running while the plebs are forced to share a single address with thousands of others.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

            That's just because we never implemented:

            https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3252.txt

            It would have solved the IPv4 address size problem very elegantly.

            1. A.P. Veening Silver badge

              Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

              That's just because we never implemented:

              https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3252.txt

              It would have solved the IPv4 address size problem very elegantly.

              Did you check the date on that RFC?

              1. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

                I knew it perfectly. That's why I used it as an example why you can't just enlarge the IPv4 address portion as if it was a string. Let's see how many don't understand the joke without an icon revealing it...

        4. Alan Brown Silver badge

          Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

          The whole point of IPv4 and v6 went whoosing several hundred feet over your head

          They were originally ROUTING protocols. The first octet was site, second department and third network within that department

          Similarly, the first chunk of IPv6 is geographic/site routing. It's sparse because it's MEANT to be sparse - a red/black decision tree

          The worst thing that possibly happened to IPv4 was to shovel allocations into "spare space", which caused routing tables to explode

      4. JackofNotrade

        Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

        "It will never see serious use" - 33% of traffic to Google is IPv6. https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

        1. Disgusted Of Tunbridge Wells Silver badge

          Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

          I bet the vast majority of that is mobile phones.

          1. Wyrdness

            Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

            "I bet the vast majority of that is mobile phones." - I'm not so sure. My home broadband and mobile phone are with Sky (who have millions of customers in the UK). The home broadband uses ipv6, whilst mobile uses ipv4.

            1. Alan Brown Silver badge

              Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

              "The home broadband uses ipv6, whilst mobile uses ipv4."

              The oddest part about that is that 3G is built on IPv6 - phone companies gateway the IPv6 space to a IPv4 CG NAT for reasons unknown when it would be best to leave it the f* alone

          2. Charlie Clark Silver badge

            Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

            Possibly, but so what? Mobile phones have been the majority of internet devices for years.

        2. iron Silver badge

          Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

          Which means 67% is not. Which is the more serious number?

          I don't remember the seriousness of numbers being discussed in Maths but I'd suggest the number that is double the other number is the more serious one.

          Plus not all internet traffic goes to Google, yet.

          1. Yes Me Silver badge

            Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

            And you probably never heard of compound interest either. IPv4 growth has ended, IPv6 is growing at compound interest.

            1. Disgusted Of Tunbridge Wells Silver badge
              Holmes

              Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

              What do you think "compound interest" means?

      5. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

        The funny thing is IPv6 is becoming a consumer-first technology, and will be widely deployed for consumer networks before business networks.

        Why? Because new ISP entries can't find enough IPv4 addresses. Here in Italy Comcast is launching its "Sky WiFi" internet connection (because today "WiFi" means "Internet"), but could not find enough IPv4 for its planned customer base. In the beginning it borrowed IPv4s from Sky UK, but now it's switching to a native IPv6 network using MAP-T for IPv4 compatibility.

        It's not the only new (new here...) ISP in such situation. The rollout of the national FTTH network using a wholesale model attracted many new entries that can't find enough IPv4s anywhere for their public networks.

        I guess when many households will be IPv6-enabled businesses will follow.

        https://www.ripe.net/participate/meetings/open-house/presentations/richard-patterson-sky-italia-and-map-t

        "Solve that one, with backwards compatibility, and you have a winner."

        Not going to happen. Most of the hardware and software now is IPv6 compatible. Upgrading it to a new protocol will be even more difficult than deploying IPv6.

        "release those addresses"

        Even Apple and Ford could release a few millions addresses at best. Not enough at all.

      6. Alan Brown Silver badge

        Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

        "For the average sysadmin punter, what are the real, day to day problems that IPv4 has?"

        3 billion available IP addresses, 9-12 billion connected devices

        NAT is bad enough. Multiple layers of NAT break so much it isn't funny, CGNAT is a disaster

        YOU might think you're ok but there are parts of the world (se asian and africa) with millions of people behind a single /24

    2. katrinab Silver badge
      Megaphone

      Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

      No, because I don't see a 25 year old technology suddenly becoming popular in the next 5-10 years.

      25 years in computing terms is ancient, obsolete even.

      The "problem" that IPv6 aims to solve is the use of NAT at network gateways. The thing is that most people want to have NAT at their gateway and consider it to be a good thing.

      IPv6 fanbois will tell you that NAT is not a security feature and shouldn't be used as such. They are wrong. Obviously it shouldn't be your only security measure, but it does help, a lot.

      These aforementioned fanbois will also tell you that there is another, more complicated way to achieve the same thing in IPv6. Sure, but it is more complicated, not as well tested, and offers no practical benefits over IPv4.

      IPv6 does offer more numbers to go round, and more numbers is good. Why can't we have an IPv4.1 or something that does the more numbers thing, but leaves everything else the same?

      1. tip pc Silver badge

        Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

        "Why can't we have an IPv4.1 or something that does the more numbers thing, but leaves everything else the same?"

        Like NAT?

        As I explained in another comment, when you are processing billions of packets and want efficiency you want an addressing system that'll make best use of the processor, addresses in powers of 2 work best on processors that run on powers of 2 that's why 6 bytes is not a realistic addressing proposition, 8 bytes works but why not just go 16 now and be done with it.

        The lack of backwards interoperability was a mistake.

        My view was they wanted to combine the MAC & IP in an attempt to make things easier and collapse the L2 & L3 camps. They never really envisaged the way ipv4 is working today.

        1. katrinab Silver badge
          Paris Hilton

          Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

          I'm not the one saying "add 2 bits".

          I'm saying "make it bigger"

          Nobody is complaining about IPv6 because there are too many numbers available, or the IP addresses are too long. It is all the other changes they made.

          1. tip pc Silver badge

            Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

            I agree the other changes where stupid.

            Deliberately trying to eliminate nat was an own goal.

            People didn’t need to use it if they didn’t want or need to.

            Just extending the ipv4 address range isn’t as easy as it sounds though.

            1. Yes Me Silver badge

              Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

              "Deliberately trying to eliminate nat was an own goal"

              Firstly, NAT hardly existed when IPv6 was first designed, and it certainly wasn't widespread. Second, NAT doesn't scale, which is why carriers are deserting CGN at warp speed now that IPv4 has run out and IPv6 is mature.

              " the other changes where stupid."

              Automatic address configuration was so stupid that IPv6 copied the idea from Appletalk.

              A distinct interface identifier field was so stupid that IPv6 copied it from Novell Netware and DECnet.

              DHCP was so stupid that IPv6 copied it from IPv4.

              Yes, extension headers were a bit stupid, which is why they are mainly unused.

              I could go on, but IPv4 is a really primitive design compared to (say) Appletalk, Netware and DECnet which objectively speaking dominated the enterprise market when IPv6 was designed. If we hadn't done IPv6, you'd probably have got OSI shoved down your throat.

              1. Disgusted Of Tunbridge Wells Silver badge

                Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

                CGNAT is only required because of the shortage (and therefore cost) of IPv4 addresses.

                IPV4.1 with a 64bit address space would have solved this problem.

          2. KSM-AZ

            The number is too long. . .

            The shift from 32-64 bit CPU architetctures should have been a guide. But no, Itanium is much better than AMD64. From a raw technology aspect, it probably was, but completely re-inventing the wheel was not the worlds best idea.

            I know I could redesign an IP4 header with a marker of some sort to trigger address mapping to a 64 bit address and 32 bit port number. IPv4x, short term use 6 octets everywhere with leading zeros, until the stacks and such grok the wider space ummm kinda like 64 bit cpu's did. BGP tables overflowed long ago, and ipv6 does not make that any better. Just like your phone number an IP address can be anywhere. keep the space tight to cut down on stoopidity. A tiered routing approach is not a super bad idea. Nonetheless assuming most backbone routing as /24 of 32 --> /40 of 48 Keeping a full routing table might require a rather large chunk of memory.

            Ipv4 went classless long before it officially went classless.

        2. Nanashi

          Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

          The lack of what now? v6 is backwards compatible in many, many different ways. Describe a method of backwards compatibility that would actually work, and v6 most likely already has it or something functionally similar. There's at least a dozen different methods available, depending on what your use-case, limitations, goals etc are.

          If there's anything v6 lacks, it's not backwards compatibility.

      2. John Sager

        Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

        Security at your router/firewall for IPv6 doesn't have to be any worse than what NAT supposedly gives you for v4. A couple of iptables/nftables rules and an ultimate 'DROP' policy in the FORWARD table will give you that. Of course the wifi router makers need to get on board with v6 which they haven't done hitherto because there is 'no demand'. Perhaps pressure from ISPs that are going to v6 will persuade them to get their act together.

        1. Yes Me Silver badge
          Thumb Up

          Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

          I upvoted that, but take half a downvote because wifi routers are largely there now if the f***ing ISP switches IPv6 on. Seven years since I got my first FritzBox with perfect IPv6 support, and any device that uses OpenWrt is fine.

  2. Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

    Version 6

    IPv6 is already quite popular in use, but not at many cloud vendors. Cloud vendors have been hoarding IPv4 addresses and it's in their best interest that you feel like you need one. It's also wrong to look at your workplace's network or Docker and assume that their IPv6 isn't working. Except for some old telcos that never upgraded past DSL, most US Internet connections are IPv6.

    Cellular 6G is completely dead until it can find a reason to exist. It's current ideas expand upon all the features of 5G that are proving to be unpopular and unpractical. A mmWave access point every 100 meters, an edge compute datacenter every 1km, and a world of unified AI with perfect connectivity? Maybe someday, but not with this tech.

    1. vtcodger Silver badge

      Re: Version 6

      I have no idea what 6G actually is. And if prior experience is any guide, neither do most of the folks babbling about it. But my first question would be whether it's going to use higher frequencies (shorter wavelengths) than current technologies. If so, is it going to work worth a damn indoors without specialized construction that includes "windows" that are transparent to 6G wavelengths?

  3. Bitsminer Silver badge

    What is another phrase for "multi-cloud"?

    "Perfect Storm"

  4. druck Silver badge
    Unhappy

    IPv6 still 5 to 10 years away...

    ...for PlusNet

    1. Alan Brown Silver badge

      Re: IPv6 still 5 to 10 years away...

      and BorkBork

      Threads on their forums dating back over 10 years, including one that was active for more than 7 until one of their mods shut it down due to the ongoing criticism

      https://community.talktalk.co.uk/t5/Technology/When-will-TalkTalk-support-IPv6/td-p/1125348

  5. Rockets

    IPv6 and CPE

    Agree with Gartner about IPv6. I mean when we've still got a bug from 2009 in the dhcp6c (wide-dhcpv6) still unpatched on a lot of new model CPE gear from SOHO vendors it's going to be hard to get wide spread adoption. My ISP has deployed IPv6 across their network and they've hit numerous bugs with their Cisco BNG's and various CPE equipment. It's still in a beta state and customers may opt in for it. They use IPoE and they saw some brands over CPE effectively DDoS their DHCP servers due to crap DHCPv6 implementations on customers equipment. I use pfSense their DHCPv6 client for the WAN interface was only recently patched to work properly to the specs if the WAN interface got interrupted for any length of time. Palo Alto don't even support DHCPv6 as WAN interface option. Android for a stupid philosophical reason won't support DHCPv6, only SLAAC. IPv6 seems to be in this perpetual state of catch 22, some vendors don't want to implement it or implement it properly on their gear because there's not wide use of it and wide use will only come from wide implementation.

  6. Xalran

    Private 5G is already here.

    That's the big 2021 topic in telecom... Who ( in the realm of telco kit vendors ) will be the first to boast an operational 5G ( preferably SA ) Private Network.

    The most difficult part is probably going to get the customer that with the first 5G network to agree to be in the communication.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    IPv6 is the Fusion of technology.

    It is always just n years away...

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