Hi Folks, (Sorry for the long post. Please delete now if you're not interested in IPv6 adoption.) In a recent Security Now! podcast host Steve Gibson reported on a blog post by APNIC Labs about the state of IPv6 adoption. I hope this isn't considered off-topic here, after all, it affects all of us. While my work environment is dual-stack, my home network is still IPv4 only, and it may stay that way for as long as I'm around. APNIC Labs is a research division of the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), focused on internet infrastructure and operational research, so they should know what they're talking about. They have developed a method to measure IPv6 compatibility from the user's perspective. Their measurements show that after more than 25 years of IPv6 only 41% of users are IPv6 enabled, on a global basis. They show a trend line where if the adoption rate is linear 100% will be reached about the year 2045. Yet they show that the adoption rate for the US hit about 51% in 2019 but has remain flat since then! (this is being written in Nov 2024) They note that the main driver for IPv6 was address starvation on v4. While v4 offers about 3,000,000,000 net address, there are currently about 20,000,000,000 devices on the Internet. Two technologies have enabled this Internet growth: NAT and SNI. NAT (Network Address Translation) allows IPv4 client address space to expand from 32-bits to 48-bits. SNI (Server Name Indication) is an extension to the TLS (Transport Layer Security) protocol that allows multiple SSL/TLS certificates to be associated with one IP address. So these two technologies have basically infinitely increased the effective address space of IPv4. So what is to be gained from IPv6 adoption? From my perspective it increases complexity while reducing security and reliability. This all implies that IPv4 will always be with us. IPv6 will increase globally to some point, but will level off as it has in the US. This of course is anathema to IP purists who claim that the Internet was designed on the principle that every device has a globally unique address. But in reality, is this really necessary? The point is made that DNS has replaced the router for presentation of web content. Interesting. Link to Security Now! podcast show notes. IPv6 notes begin on page 13. https://www.grc.com/sn/sn-998-notes.pdf Here's a video of the podcast starting at the IPv6 part: https://youtu.be/PuqbdXGucH8 Regards, Lew