I'm just curious, what, exactly, is it that you require the firewall to do, in terms of support?
So, why so little IPv6 traffic?
Well, the biggest issue is money. Specifically, the department of commerce estimates it will cost $25 billion for ISPs to upgrade to native IPv6.
And this massive expense comes without the lure of additional revenue since IPv6 offers diminishingly few incentives nor new competitive features to attract or upsell customers. In many ways, IPv6 in the United States is much like the high definition television federal mandate (but without the mandate or the really crisp looking football games).
Perhaps the biggest problem is that IPv4 works. And works well.
While IPv4 addresses are still relatively plentiful and cheap, ISPs and end customers have few incentives to migrate to IPv6. Some recent research even suggests IPv4 addresses may be more plentiful than previously believed. This tech report found that less than 4% of allocated addresses are actually occupied by visible end hosts. The authors concluded that most Internet space is likely, in fact, unused (though allocated).
All of this lack of IPv6 adoption has lead to quite a bit of hand wringing in the ISP technical community. While not declaring IPv6 a failure, discussions do wander into questions about “premature extinction of IPv6″ or whether “IPv6 is an exercise in futility”.
The Future of IPv6
It is now clear the original optimistic IPv6 deployment plans have failed.
While the end of the Internet is not near, neither is IPv6. At the current rate of adoption, we are a decade or more away from pervasive adoption of dual stack support for IPv6. As Alain correctly notes in a recent IETF draft, “The IANA free pool of IPv4 addresses will be depleted soon, way before any significant IPv6 deployment will have occurred”.
So IPv6 adoption will take far longer and will look far different than most of us expected back in 1994 when the IAB announced the selection of IPv6. Clearly things need to change, including IETF and vendor exploration of other technologies to facilitate IPv6 adoption such as better NAT interoperability or lighter weight dual stack.
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