I interpret this blogpost, which is excellent btw, not as ‘IPv6 is a badly designed protocol’ but rather as ‘we haven’t done a good job at evolving our network design as a hole’.
The author explains that the only real issue with IPv6 itself, is that roaming between wireless routers wasn’t addressed (he calls it ‘mobile IP’) and that it could be properly fixed by using another identifier for sessions (uuid,port instead of sourceIP,sourcePORT,destIP,destPORT). Which would be doable with QUIC over UDP.
I think it was badly designed in that it assumed we’d ditch IPv4 for IPv6. That was an absurdly unrealistic expectation.
Forget all of the rest of the issues. From day one they should have come up with a robust, performant system for bridging between IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. Make it so that EVERY IPv4 address is a valid IPv6 address, and provide a simple, robust way to tunnel traffic aimed at an IPv6 address through an IPv4 network.
That totally would have been possible. Then everyone could have switched to IPv6 with no downside, and switching out middle layers of the system would have been great, welcome optimizations.
As opposed to the reality today, where IPv4 is basically never going to go away, because the long tail of cheap devices and older networks have no incentive to switch.
Thank you for the link to this story. It connected together a few dots and made some things finally makes sense.
Just remember that IPv6 was introduced in 1995. At the time it probably seemed to be just fine.
I’ve finally read this article that’s been open in a mobile browser tab since it was posted. It’s a great read, and I love all the twists and buts.
I wasn’t expecting that QUIC would show up at the end as a possible saviour.
Wow, what a nice story 😁
I remember trying to wrap my head around it close to 20 years ago back in tech school & while i know IPv6 is used out in the real world at the ISP/backbone level, every corporation I’ve ever worked for uses a class A IPv4 network internally (and maybe a few class D’s too). every network I’ve ever used at home is class C IPv4.
IPv6 is some nebulous thing that exists but I’ve never needed to do anything with it…
The good thing is that for most people IPv6 happens and is used transparently. They don’t notice whether and how their web-browser and OS uses IPv6 or IPv4.
IPv6 certainly introduced additional complexity to networking, network routing/decision-making, and administration. But it was/is a technical necessity.
