Re: [v6ops] Incremental Deployment of IPv6-only Wi-Fi for IETF Meetings

[Simon Hobson <[e-mail]>]

Philip Homburg <[e-mail]> wrote:

>> But after 20 years of IPv6, it's really time to seriously work on killing
>> IPv4.  
> 
> In a world where most people have no access to IPv6. Where IPv6 deployment
> is just slightly more than a blip on the radar. 
> 
> Yeah, there it is very obvious that we should start killing IPv4 support.
> 
> Convincing people that IPv6 is a good idea is already hard enough. So now
> we tell them that they should really do 'IPv6-only' and break all unmodified
> IPv4 hosts. That should really help IPv6 adoption.

"Break all unmodified hosts ?"
I was under the impression that many unmodified hosts (and the software running on them) was capable of running on an IPv6 only network - but there are specific, notable exceptions (OpenVPN config specific, and MS Outlook an Mac are two that have been mentioned), and that the scale is not clearly known.
If there is an experiment that will allow some insight into the scale of the issue, and with a self selected group who are likely to be able to provide more meaningful feedback than "internet's broken") then it's useful to be done.

And when people talk of "kill IPv4", I don't get the impression that they mean to literally get rid of it any time soon. Before you can get rid of it, a lot has to happen - and already mentioned, if you don't start that process then it'll never happen.
You've raised a good point - many people don't have IPv6 - that's one area to be addressed, and a good way of addressing that is to show that it's here, it's working, and the ISPs responsible really need to extract digit from posterior and start providing it.

I see a parallel with the old walled gardens like AOL, back when they were dial up and not internet connected. Many thought this new fangled internet thing, with it's complicated "IP addresses", was something to be ignored. Remember what happened to them ? it didn't happen overnight - but bit by bit they "went internet". First it was with "gateways", and eventually native IP - right now we are still at the "gateways" stage with IPv6 adoption, with many still stuck in the IPv4 walled garden, while many of us have this new fangled IPv6.

But if we sit back and wait, then those IPv4 walled gardens will remain, and the argument will be "but you can't kill it off" forever. I doubt if IPv4 will ever truly disappear (just as I still have some old kit doing AppleTalk !) - but it will get to the point where end users having to have it will be few and far between, eventually.
But, as Laozi said, "a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step". A lot of people seem afraid of taking a single step, let alone a journey.