We Fixed IPv4 Too Well for IPv6 to Win.

Hinzugefügt: 2026-06-06

[00:00:00]We ran out of IPv4 addresses more than a decade ago. The replacement was finished and ready to go. So why in 2026 is most of the internet still running on IPv4.

[00:00:09]And why is IPv6 kind of stuck? The entire point of IPv6 was to fix IPv4 address exhaustion. That was the pitch.

[00:00:16]But as Jeff Houston Appnik puts it, IPv6 is basically IPv4 with bigger addresses.

[00:00:22]It's not faster. It's not more secure.

[00:00:24]It's not more capable. Just bigger. Now, if you're not familiar who Jeff Houston is, he's a chief scientist over at Apnic and probably the most cited researcher on IPv4 exhaustion. And in my forum post here, I have a link to his article so you can read further. But I mentioned earlier also that we ran out of IP addresses about a decade ago. So, how have we solved this IPv4 IPv6 problem if we haven't transitioned, but we've also ran out of addresses? And the answer is really simple. It's NAT.NAT solved it for the client side and SNI solved it for the server side.NAT Nat made IPv4 stretch far past his expected life. And I also included a little bit of history here because this serial port YouTube channel has this untold story of how the Pix firewall and NAT saved the internet.

[00:01:09]Saved is kind of a fun way to put it.

[00:01:12]Kind of depends on your perspective. If you're very much pro IPv6, this is part of what stalled it is. This firewall was the first successful commercial product to include NAT. And this magically solved the big worry about IPv4 exhaustion for the client side. And then as I mentioned, SNI solved it for the server side. And these two solves or mitigations that allowed us to use it didn't just buy a little bit more time.

[00:01:39]It fixed the problem good enough. And I believe good enough is why things have slowed down and we've kind of hit a plateau for IPv6 adoption. There's not any real business incentive. There's not a better security pitch. There's not faster. There's not a real strong use case for these companies to spend money on IPv6. And you can't just simply say, "But Tom, it wouldn't cost them anymore." Many things have IPv6 built in. And that's where, well, I want to dive in deeper because that's part of the point of this video. I get very frequently asked on really anything I cover because it has an IPv4 stack and probably has an IPv6 stack. Tom, why do you just disable or not talk about the IPv6 stack? That's simple. It frequently is broken. Frequently, the reason people are asking me to make a video is because it doesn't work right. It doesn't do this right. The VPN doesn't work with IPv6. Whatever that reason might be, I can't really solve that. My solution is frequently just to disable it. Which I know some people said, "But Tom, you're part of the problem by not pushing it forward." And I am, well, not someone with that level of influence. I know people may call me an influencer and I've been on YouTube and on the internet for a long time, but me covering it, I I appreciate people who think that I'm part of the problem because that means you think I have influence over this in some way. I can assure you I don't. I may suggest to companies to do it, but companies aren't overly incentivized to put the work in. And until we have a mass adoption of it and there's a place to really battle test it where it can get truly debugged, there's going to be a lot of products where this is kind of that other thing that maybe people bug them enough to kind of put in but not really finish. And I wanted to leave links to these articles cuz I think it's fascinating how we got here. But honestly, I don't know the solution forward. I don't really see IPv4 going away anytime soon, not being replaced by IPv6, and certainly not being replaced by the hallucination that was IPv8.

[00:03:35]Uh, feel free to go down that rabbit hole. I'll probably leave some links in that forum post, but IPv8, I I don't know if it's a joke or hallucination or where it was. It's not realistic. I do sometimes joke that I think something will replace both IPv4 and IPv6 prior to uh IPv6 getting adopted. I don't know what that is because it hasn't been invented yet. Like I said, it's not IPv8. But nonetheless, this is why I don't do a lot of videos on IPv6, but I also don't want to stop there. I want to be a person who offers you more information. Check out that serial port video because I think it's really good to give you some interesting history of NAT solving the problem. And because all this was kind of happening all at once where IPv6 was being pushed by certain groups of people by other groups of people were solving things with NAT and SNI and CGNAT uh you kind of see where the internet well if you don't have a king of the internet and the internet would probably not work well if it had a single king or queen or someone who could just say this is the date and this is how things are going to be on this date. The internet's really a cooperative collaboration between lots of entities and getting groups of people to agree on something is really really hard and that's the fundamental of it.

[00:04:46]So where do we go from here? I don't know. But I'm always welcome to hear suggestions from you. So leave them in the comments down below. There's already been people joining in that forum post on IPv6 and talking about some of the challenges they have with it. Like I said, I'm very pro going to new technologies. It does solve some problems, especially for all of you home users or even myself who would like to see more IPv6 so I could have more addresses across more things. I I like all these things. Uh but I don't really know how to get there to them. So I'm really hoping maybe someone else has an idea because there's a lot of people talking about it. There's a lot of people at APNIC talking about it. So check out their articles and everything that I link because it's a lot of reading and I'm all ears if you have some suggestions. Love hearing from you.

[00:05:27]See you online. You'll probably be contacting me over IPv4 though, at least for quite a few more years. Thanks.