Redploying most of 127/8 as unicast public

Sat Nov 20 18:44:28 UTC 2021

Once upon a time, Masataka Ohta <mohta at necom830.hpcl.titech.ac.jp> said:
> It merely means IPv6 is not deployable with the real reason.

Except that is provably wrong.  A significant number of people are using
IPv6 (and probably don't even know it, because it works without notice).
Almost everything you do on the US cell networks is IPv6.  I'm running
over IPv6 to send this message, or when I go to Google or Facebook or
Netflix for example.

I didn't have to do anything special to get any of that to work; I use
my own CPE (which I didn't have to configure special to get IPv6), but
my provider-provided CPE also supported IPv6 out of the box.  The common
client OSes all support IPv6 out of the box (only major snag I'm aware
of is Android and DHCPv6, c'mon Google, but typical residential CPE does
RA anyway so this only affects larger businesses with managed networks).

Non-general-purpose devices are lagging some, but on the game system
front, Xbox (at least) supports IPv6.  IPv6 support is even in things
like my home audio receiver (Internet connected for streaming music,
which Pandora and Spotify at least support IPv6) and 5+ year old injket
printer.

Could I run IPv6 only today?  No, not quite.  But it's getting closer to
that point every day.  Providers running CG-NAT see that getting IPv6
dual-stack deployed reduces the IPv4 bandwidth (so reduces the CG-NAT
costs) because so much is IPv6-enabled already.

-- 
Chris Adams <cma at cmadams.net>