2/20/2026 at 2:56:15 AM
by zdw
2/20/2026 at 9:00:43 PM
This seems like an evergreen content topic. It's obvious that IPv6 adoption is high enough and critical for some industries in particular (i.e. cellular providers) with lots of endpoints. Increasing endpoint adoption is good. But service providers need to care about the remaining percentage. Say you get to 80, 90, even 99% adoption. An SP still can't flip IPv4 off. So what does it matter? It really doesn't warrant much concern.by kev009
2/20/2026 at 4:21:24 PM
I think we're tracking the wrong number. We should not be tracking adoption, we should be tracking it's integral value. Not the current position of IPv6 adoption but abasement of IPv6 adoption.by 1970-01-01
2/20/2026 at 12:23:57 PM
Gonna re-post my 2023 comment on IPv6:>It is gradually becoming acceptable to dismiss IPv6 and suggest searching for a modern, practically minded alternative. Important first step in untangling the mess.
>Naturally opinions vary as to what exactly would constitute modern. Common complaint is the significant mixing of OSI layers, in particular application level concerns like significant baggage of encryption & authentication. And then there's my pet peeve of BSD Sockets API incompatibility which was introduced accidentally.
by dexen
2/20/2026 at 2:23:45 PM
I think that's an incredibly silly take. Any new protocol would first have to be implemented by all the routing dbd switching vendors. It would probably have a 3rd mutually incompatible addressing scheme, because yes IPv4s limited addresses space is still a problem there are countries that depend on v6s expanded address space to have sufficient connectivity (Particularly in APNIC).Switching out the fundamental addressing protocol of the Internet is hard. You have to herd the cats of the hundreds of thousands of operators, device, operating system, and application vendors, and as long as the old protocol still works, no one has a strong incentive to switch. But they have a big distinctive of missing out on customers, or having to figure out the new protocol.
Any IPvNG is going to run face first into the same incentive problems that v6 has.
by patmorgan23
2/20/2026 at 6:10:58 PM
Yeah. It's particularly silly because OP is suggesting to replace something that everyone except for network administrators and network hardware vendors can treat as "IP with large addresses" [0] with a "modern, practically minded alternative".Like, does OP propose that we switch away from IP to something that behaves significantly differently? Good fucking luck getting all the little bugs and behavioral assumptions baked in to just about everything squared away over the next fifty years.
[0] And -for the most part- network admins can treat it like that, too.
by simoncion
2/20/2026 at 12:25:17 PM
SMTP will never go IPv6 in my opinion.IP reputation scoring is feasible with 4.3 billion IPv4 addresses.
That model breaks down when you’re dealing with 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 possible IPv6 addresses.
by lol_catz
2/20/2026 at 12:40:34 PM
That's not how SMTP reputation scoring works. Even in IPv4 per-IP reputation stopped being sufficient many years ago because bulk senders churn pools and rotate addresses. Modern systems typically score prefixes, ASNs, DKIM/SPF alignment, TLS and behavior.by scatbot
2/20/2026 at 3:06:27 PM
About 58% of all of the email my company sends out of it's outbound relays is to IPv6 MXs. I've never really had to deal with discoverability issues related to v6by benjojo12
2/20/2026 at 1:38:34 PM
Microsoft and Google both have IPv6 addresses published for their MXby patmorgan23
2/20/2026 at 1:25:57 PM
I published AAAA records for my MX hostnames a few years ago and so far only gmail.com is sending mails via IPv6, which is disappointing.by winstonwinston
2/20/2026 at 12:31:38 PM
You can score subnets instead of individual ips.by mono442
2/20/2026 at 1:02:24 PM
Perhaps you mean “prefixes” such as they are assigned by registrars, and announced by routing protocols.The instructor of my Cisco classes said that the only module that caused students to break down in tears was VLSM.
by RupertSalt