IPv6 will never happen. We will continue to fudge IPv4, until IPv4.1, then IPv4++, then eventually IPv4.999999. I don't know what is the right answer, but I am pretty confident that IPv6 isn't it.
Except it is already happening; I'm currently consulting for an organisation that does have IPv6 stuff in live use (the.se ccTLD registry). And modifications of IPv4 won't help; any change to the standard that addresses the namespace size requires the same infrastructure upgrades as IPv6 does. What may happen is more and more use of NAT, and/or more and more piggybacking of one protocol on another. But those are kludges, and at some point changing to v6 will be more economical.
Large-scale changeover will almost certainly happen in China and India first, since they have very small parts of the v4 space compared to the US and Europe.
The problem is the vast hordes of legacy equipment in peoples homes, offices and the network that will never have IPv6. I am not defending V4, just saying that V6 has serious problems. Not that I have any answers, and I have been doing serious thinking about the problem. Yes NAT is growing, piggybacking will grow (I have both here) as well - its a mess.
My task list includes providing IPv6 support in our products at work, but priority is low and no customer has asked for it yet. Ten years ago there was a panic about the world running out of IP address space, but it never happened. What we got in this country was a less wasteful use of the available address space.
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branchandroot
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-17 12:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-17 12:43 pm (UTC)Large-scale changeover will almost certainly happen in China and India first, since they have very small parts of the v4 space compared to the US and Europe.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-17 05:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-17 09:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-17 09:39 pm (UTC)