
IPv6 celebrates its 20th birthday by reaching 10% deployment - nikbackm
http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/01/ipv6-celebrates-its-20th-birthday-by-reaching-10-percent-deployment/
======
geocar
FFS: MX records didn't take 20 years to get deployed!

This is crap. After twenty years, none of the problems with IPv6[1] have
resolved, and when you get an IPv6 address from some places (hotels, mostly),
much of the Internet turns into a unusable ghetto.

There's also _zero_ IPv6 at BT or Virgin Media, two of the largest Internet
providers in the UK. We've been hearing we'll get it "next year" for a while,
and I'm frankly tired of dealing with the incompatibility.

If IPv6 offered a _single_ user-visible feature it would sell like hotcakes:
Mobile IP? IPSEC? All just as optional as with IPv4. Heck, if they even nailed
auto-configuration or let multicast onto the Internet at least they'd have
some customers.

Instead, it's sold a twenty-year clusterfuck of doomsday predictions about
running out of IPv4 addresses, and the experience has been impossible to learn
from because (a) it's spanning three decades now, and (b) everyone
disillusioned by IPv6 can't come around without losing face.

I'm tired of IPv6 patting itself on the back; This was the worst deployment
ever.

[1]:
[https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html](https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html)

~~~
sergiosgc
Bernstein's rant shows its age. It kind of proves the reverse of what you are
trying to state.

The text starts with a question that undermines the whole text: "does every
node need direct Internet connection?". Today, with P2P traffic on the uprise,
the answer is a striking Yes. If, even with the hurdles of poor performing
NATs, there is market pressure for P2P protocols, it's absurdly obvious the
Internet must be symmetrical, not server-client.

The text then goes on about the impossible transition plan for IPv6. It's now
obvious that moving servers to dual-stack, then clients progressively onto
IPv6 (through provider address-space exhaustion) is a sound plan. It's
happening, and it's approaching the critical point. 2016 starts at 10% IPv6
traffic, will end at 25% IPv6 traffic. No sound company today will launch its
services in IPv4 only and eschew 10%-25% of potential traffic.

~~~
zanny
You're going to hit a wall with every ISP in the US and any country whose
major telecos don't give a shit.

Fundamentally, why do they _have_ to support ipv6? Especially when they have
monopoly power over their customers? Its not like the customers can see the
difference, and if a website doesn't work for a network of millions because
the site v6 only the only loser is the website.

I'd be surprised if we hit 15% this year. Web services are doing a good job
supporting v6, but now you have to get _all_ ISPs to do it as well, and those
ISPs are always ranked as some of the most consumer unfriendly companies in a
lot of countries because they have no market pressure to improve or serve
their customers well.

~~~
icehawk
Comcast has spoken a bit about why they're implementing IPv6.

From:
[http://meetings.ripe.net/ripe-54/presentations/IPv6_manageme...](http://meetings.ripe.net/ripe-54/presentations/IPv6_management.pdf)

 _In the control plane, all devices need to be remotely managed, so NAT isn’t
going to help us, nor is federated Net 10 islands…

IPv6 is the clear solution for us._

~~~
spacecowboy_lon
So they are managing devices inband as Sir Humphrey might say a "How very
courageous"

~~~
X-Istence
The devices are set top boxes, modems and more. Those devices only have a
single plug that plugs them into the network, technically it is all inband.

It's only separated in that your cable modem gets a non-routable IPv6 address.
It's non-routable within the internet but is a stock standard globally unique
IP address. This is used for management purposes.

------
zeroxfe
Note that adoption in the US is 25% (skewing the world average.) See
[https://www.google.ca/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-c...](https://www.google.ca/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-
country-ipv6-adoption&tab=per-country-ipv6-adoption)

Many American ISPs distribute both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses to their users, and
almost all mobile devices have some sort of IPv6 connectivity.

With Happy Eyeballs
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Eyeballs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Eyeballs)),
and the other common transition technologies, IPv6 is largely transparent to
most users and works quite well.

------
Loic
Here in Germany (Telekom as ISP) IPv6 is now provided as a standard dual-
stack. Your router/DSL modem gets a given IPv6 and another prefix to
distribute IP to the devices. This is working surprisingly well, my last
connection to the Cloudflare control panel resulted in a warning:

    
    
         Hi,
        
         Your CloudFlare account ... was logged in from an IP address we didn't recognize ... 
         following IP address: 2003:72:4f0e:3600:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx.
    

I had first a kind of "is it a bug?" reaction because I did not catch the IPv6
address at first read. I was expecting an IPv4 address.

For the matter, the connection is reliable with no particular latency
problems. I cannot distinguish between a site on IPv4 or IPv6 from an end-user
experience point of view.

~~~
treenyc
Why can't Time Warner, Verizon, BT do that?

Is there a commercial interest for different companies to keep IPv4?

~~~
JshWright
Time Warner does exactly this in my area (and I suspect it's fairly
widespread).

The issue is, the modems they hand out to many of their users are not DOCSIS 3
(unless the user is paying for a plan that requires DOCSIS 3 speeds).

If you bring your own IPv6 capable modem, or sign up for one of their higher
speed plans, you'll get IPv6.

~~~
sterwill
I'm a Time Warner customer in North Carolina and have IPv6 service. It works
well, but the IPv6 networks aren't statically assigned, so I can't reach my
devices at home reliably.

~~~
simoncion
Does TW use DHCPv6-PD to allocate networks to customer sites? If it does, are
you sure that your router is presenting the same DUID to TW's DHCPv6 servers?

IME, as long as you present the same DUID to Comcast's DHCPv6 servers, and
your equipment renews its DHCP lease before the expiry time, you retain the
same IPv6 prefix.

Hope this helps. :)

------
eknkc
Just realised something;

I've been developing web applications for a relatively long time now. Maybe in
the last 10 years, I had my IP addresses stored in databases etc in IPv6 aware
types just in case we had an IPv6 deployment in future. Better be ready.

Last month, I was working on something that needed to store IP logs. I packed
them in 32 bit unsigned integers. Was not a well thought decision. I think I
don't care anymore, just gave up.

Anyone doing the opposite of that? Maybe I was naive to jump on the train that
early and these are better times. Felt like that 5 years ago too though.

~~~
geocar
I think a 32-bit hash of an IPv6 address will be fine for a long time, and
remain much faster to search/sort than a 128-bit value.

I also think that if you _can 't_ upgrade your database you're going to have
other problems as well.

~~~
IanCal
> I think a 32-bit hash of an IPv6 address will be fine for a long time

Be careful with this, a 32 bit hash can see collisions with remarkably low
numbers. A 50% chance of a collision is seen with ~75k entries:
[http://preshing.com/20110504/hash-collision-
probabilities/](http://preshing.com/20110504/hash-collision-probabilities/)

Depends on your application as to whether this is a problem or not.

~~~
geocar
50% chance of _one_ collision. Be careful with those maths!

~~~
IanCal
Yes, thanks for the clarification, it's what I meant with "a collision" but I
realise that's ambiguous.

~~~
geocar
No worries, and you're absolutely right that it depends on your application
whether this is a problem or not!

Estimating population sizes? "Unrecognised IP addresses?" Probably fine.

Interning the hash and using the real IP address in a database someplace?
Probably not.

------
fs111
Neither hackernews nor the linked article are reachable via IPv6. That is sad.

------
wooptoo
16% of home subscribers in Romania are connected to the internet via IPv6,
most of them without even knowing it. This is largely thanks to the massive
deployment effort led by the country's biggest provider - RDS. The connection
is a dual-stack one. I've been using this for almost two years and it has
worked very well. Most large sites support IPv6 without any hicups. This is a
relevant read on how they did it:
[http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/resources/case-
stud...](http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/resources/case-study-how-
romanias-rcsrds-deployed-ipv6/)

~~~
erhardm
If you want to see up to date information about RDS IPv6 adoption divided by
county in Romania: [http://labs.rcs-rds.ro/](http://labs.rcs-rds.ro/)

It also includes speed of each county.

------
verelo
Crazy idea. Maybe people just don't understand IPV6?

Is there any single good source (i.e. the minimal bullet points on a single
page) that helps people make the switch?

~~~
jakobegger
You can't just "make the switch". Most devices already support IPv6 anyway.
The problem is that ISPs and hosting providers don't support IPv6.

~~~
verelo
Right, fair enough but things I can do as a consumer are choose a particular
ISP, and ensure i'm using up to date OS / network drivers etc.

I feel like saying there is nothing we can do to speed up the process is
giving in a little too early when I've personally seen very little shared with
the public that is understandable and helps people push this forward.

~~~
zaphoyd
If you live in an area where you have a choice of ISP then at least inquire
about whether they support IPv6. Chances are if you have a choice the factors
other than IPv6 will make more of a difference. I.e. I'd have a hard time
recommending an IPv6 enabled 6Mbit DSL connection over a 100Mbit cable one
without.

I've certainly kept ISP choices in mind when choosing which community or
neighborhood to live in. Ironically I find myself looking for places with
Comcast because they've had solid IPv6 support for years.

If you are involved in a decision making capacity with a company that offers
services over the internet, try to pick equipment, ISPs, SaaS vendors that use
IPv6 where possible. With a few notable exceptions (rrrrrrr AWS) its not
particularly difficult anymore. If you are at trade shows, quiz vendors about
their IPv6 support.

Lots of ISPs have gotten on board recently at the cores of their networks but
CPE equipment is often old (DOCSIS 2 modems, WRT54G bases). This holiday when
I was visiting family I took a few minutes to swap out their ancient router
for one that supports IPv6. As a result they'll also get faster and more
reliable Wifi now so its often an easy sell for other reasons.

------
zeristor
Isn't it written that once penetration gets past 15% for most new technologies
it starts to really ramp up. Putting the 'O' into Ogive.

~~~
andruby
I'm pretty sure IPv6 adoption will follow the standard S-shaped adoption curve
[1]. If true, that sucks, because it means that the last 10% will take
approximately as long as the first 10%.

Intuitively, I feel like that could in fact be the case. The last 10% to
switch will probably be small ISP's without resources/knowledge, old devices
that don't support IPv4 and old servers/webapps that haven't been updated in
years.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations)

~~~
nly
But won't it reach a point where adoption is so high that major backbones and
carriers simply retire their IPv4 equipment?

At that point you adopt or die.

~~~
X-Istence
There are already carriers that are looking at taking IPv4 in at the edges,
encapsulating it in IPv6 and then decapping it before handing it off to their
customer.

Thereby the core network can be entirely IPv6 without any legacy IPv4.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
Hey you, HN reader!

Do you run a website? Perhaps help to administer a website? Given you're on
this site, it's not unlikely you do.

Well, does your site work over IPv6? If Yes, great! If you don't know, assume
it doesn't. You may just need to add just a single line to your config file
(e.g. `listen [::]:80;` for nginx). Go and do it. Beware that a virtual server
you're using may not even have IPv6 networking enabled by default.

I finally decided to bring my sites into the modern age last month, and went
and modified all my config files so I could use IPv6, TLS and PHP 7. Was worth
it, I think.

~~~
rconti
And your code, and your load balancers, and....

There's a big difference between "it technically works" and "it does what you
want it to do and works at scale"

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Oh for sure. Don't just flip the switch tomorrow on your large site with a
team behind. Even if it's a personal site, test it.

But at least try it out, see if it works, see what you need to do to get it
working. Too many people stick with the defaults and lock themselves out from
the IPv6 world.

------
yummybear
Jan 4. 2195 will be a glorious day.

------
ilek
Since it's based on Google metrics - what are the stats like for countries
where Google is not the most popular search engine? E.g China, Russia and
Japan.

~~~
netheril96
Is it really based on Google metrics? Google has been blocked by the Great
Firewall on IPv4 networks since last year, but is still reachable via IPv6. So
a Chinese who accesses Google either does it with a foreign IP (VPN or proxy),
or with an IPv6 address within China. That would put the statistics close to
100% IPv6 usage.

~~~
rahimnathwani
Do any domestic ISPs offer IPv6 addresses?

------
SFjulie1
Figures are like bikinis: they show almost all, except the essential.

This is a unique source from Google that is a stake holder in IPv6 deployment
that has interests in you adopting this technology.

Does anyone else with critical sense would like to have more information to
corroborate these claim?

Like, what is the top 100 AS percent of IPv6 exchange? What are the devices?
(mainly android on 4G networks) What is the traffic per protocols? (is it only
android phones pushing your secret data to NSA or does it have the signature
of residential use too?) Could we have for TCP/UDP a distribution graph for
speed of connection/failures compared to IPv4? How much SIP invites get
dropped between v6 to v4 and the opposite? ...

One source of information, with only one metric does not tell us much more
that google want us to know this.

~~~
zaphoyd
Google is not the only group whose statistics show this trend.

Here are a bunch more, including measurements from CDNs, ISPs, network
exchanges, RIRs, the US government, and other large content providers, as well
as analysis of publicly available information like AS tables, DNS records,
Alexa lists:
[http://www.worldipv6launch.org/measurements/](http://www.worldipv6launch.org/measurements/)
[http://bgp.he.net/ipv6-progress-report.cgi](http://bgp.he.net/ipv6-progress-
report.cgi)

My own personal measurements support these claims. I worked on a small
academic conference website not too long ago and the percentage of signups
from IPv6 addresses approximately matched the traffic % that Google published
for that time period. My own website statistics see a higher level of IPv6
traffic than Google shows, though it caters to a more technical crowd so I am
not surprised.

10% global IPv6 deployment is not a Google conspiracy. =)

~~~
SFjulie1
[http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2015-11/v6perf.html](http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2015-11/v6perf.html)
I was talking about qualitative measurement like this

Quote :

These measurements show that in a large set of 1:1 individual comparisons
where the IPv4 and IPv6 paths between the same two dual stack endpoints are
compared, the two protocols, as measured by the TCP SYN round trip time, are
roughly equivalent. The measurements are within 10ms of each other 60% of the
time.

While the connection performance is roughly equivalent once the connection is
established, the probability of establishing the connection is not the same.
The current connection failure rate for IPv4 connections was seen to be some
0.2% of all connection attempts, while the equivalent connection failure rate
for unicast IPv6 is nine times higher, at 1.8% of all connection attempts.

------
mootothemax
What's the best way to test and deploy sites hosted on IPv6 addresses?

My office connection only has IPv4, and I'm loath to set things up blind.

(30 seconds of Googling isn't helping, I keep ending up on sites that test
whether _my_ connection is IPv6 or not)

~~~
marios
tunnelbroker.net, operated by Hurricane Eletric (he.net)

^Register, setup IPv6 over IPv4 tunneling. They can give you a whole /48 if
you want to play with your network. Now considering you want to test other
sites, all you need is IPv6 connectivity, so the default settings they provide
are enough. I recall they had decent docs on how to set things up for all
major OSes.

There were a few gotchas :

    
    
      * you need to make sure "ip proto 41" is not filtered by your firewall, or you won't be able to setup the tunnel
    
      * in the web interface, make sure you provide your public IPv4, and not your NATed address.

------
fivesigma
I bet most of those users are on mobile networks. The need is very apparent:
every mobile device needs to have internet access, and there's a lot of them
with more being activated every day. Mobile providers don't have enough IPv4
addresses to support that and carrier-grade NAT is even more messy than IPv6.

Most residential ISPs that support IPv6 make you go through hoops to enable
it.

------
rconti
Isn't there a consequence to letting each "subnet" (and I'm not sure at what
level this is defined... ISP?) have its own 64-bit prefix that every client
uses, and then sharing 64-bit space underneath it?

Can someone help me understand the consequences of this, and how it ends up
limiting the usable address space to some fraction of what 128bit would imply?

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
The /64 boundary is the standard boundary for each LAN. An "end site" (that
is, a customer of an ISP) was originally intended to receive one /48 each, so
enough space for 65536 /64 LANs.

You have to forget the idea that addresses are scarce. They were with IPv4,
with IPv6, they are not. The whole point of the design is to make sure they
are not scarce. Never, ever, anywhere. Conserving address space is not a
virtue. Making sure that everyone has addresses available whenever they need
some, with minimal delay and minimal administrative overhead, and with little
fragmentation in routing tables, that is the goal of IPv6. And there is no
real risk that this will lead to address exhaustion, there is enough space for
about 40000 /48 per person currently alive.

------
Nursie
I'm still not convinced by the "NAT is Bad" arguments that people use when it
comes to IPv6.

Having a public address for a device in my house seems like a potential
security problem - it's leaking information about my network to the outside
world. And it's a dream come true for traffic-tracking.

~~~
majke
Think about a bigger picture. Before NAT we used to have a symmetrical
internet. Everyone could consume content from other servers. Everyone by
definition was a server and could produce content for others.

From a philosophical point of view this is extremely important. For example
email used to be properly distributed. Nowadays the internet services are
concentrated. For example gmail receives a big share of all emails. Amazon
gets a big share of all http traffic, and so on.

In this centralised world the "client can be a server" attitude is in practice
less important. NAT's are ubiquitous. Last-mile carriers don't give static IP
addresses, etc.

But still, I would be much happier if the internet was truly decentralized.
Even if it's not possible to decentralize all services, the internet, the
addressing scheme and infrastructure just _must_ be symmetrical. Everyone
connected to the net should be able to "publish" content without the need for
anyones approval or infrastructure.

IPv6 addressing scheme, the removal of NAT's, brings back the democratization
of the internet.

~~~
Nursie
I don't disagree that people could be servers much more easily in the early
days.

But my mum doesn't want to be a server. And I don't really want my TV being
one either.

~~~
solidangle
I don't see your problem. If you don't want your TV to be a server that's
accessible from the internet then don't open any ports on your router's
firewall to your TV. NAT routers accidentally acted as firewalls (and newer
routers also acted as proper firewalls), but that doesn't mean we're going to
ditch the firewall on the router now that we have IPv6.

------
alricb
How good are IPv6 implementations nowadays? A few years ago there were quite a
few bugs in them, no?

~~~
stephen_g
IP stacks have been fine for many years. There was some problems years back
where some ISP's networks would have really crap internal IPv6 connectivity,
so IPv4 routes had much lower latency than IPv6 - but that was mainly bad
network design and operation.

All major operating systems have what's called 'happy eyeballs' algorithms to
pick the best path for each connection. Apple updated theirs last year and
reported that with most networks they tried, IPv6 was selected as the
preferred option ~99% of the time it was available[1].

1\. [https://www.ietf.org/mail-
archive/web/v6ops/current/msg22455...](https://www.ietf.org/mail-
archive/web/v6ops/current/msg22455.html)

~~~
stock_toaster
Apparently many vendors do not yet support RFC 6724, or support it poorly with
regard to ULA addresses. As such, I get mixed results with devices that have
both a ULA and a global address, with the device trying to use the ULA address
(instead of the global address) for global network egress.

------
simgidacav
I'm in no way an ipv6 expert, but I'm quite surprised it works bad for China.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Next_Generation_Internet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Next_Generation_Internet)

~~~
nine_k
I suspect that anything that does not have surveillance and censorship built
in does not "work well" for China :(

~~~
netheril96
IPv4 has no surveillance and censorship built in either. Those are red
herrings when it comes to IPv6 deployment.

~~~
spacecowboy_lon
But v6 does :-)

------
protomyth
Why didn't we expand IPv4 to take 64 or 128-bit addresses and instead created
IPv6?

~~~
lmm
Did you read the article? Every router... routes, so every router needs to
speak the new protocol. If you tried to send packets in an IPv4-compatible
way, what would you put for their addresses? They'd end up in nondeterministic
routing loops which would be terrible to debug.

~~~
protomyth
I'm asking why did the create IPv6 instead of a version of IPv4 with an
expanded address (IPv4-version 2)? Why did they not do an incremental change
instead of a whole new thing?

~~~
teraflop
It's a distinction without a difference. Any protocol with addresses larger
than 32 bits will necessarily be incompatible with IPv4, so what does it
matter whether there's a "4" or a "6" in the name?

~~~
protomyth
IPv6 seems to be a whole lot more complicated than just upping the number of
bits used for addresses. Its like they were trying to solve a bunch of things
in addition to the address range.

~~~
lmm
Per the article it mostly has the same headers. What other things are you
thinking of? Stateless autoconfig is complex but IPv4 has that option too.
Privacy extensions are complex but they are extensions, not the core spec.

~~~
chemodax
IPv6 introduced several significant changes like dropping IP packet
fragmentation.

------
fulafel
Wonder if anyone has made a study about the IPv6 retardation as a market
failure. Underbelly of network effect comes to mind (first mover ISPs get no
advantage/payoff even though the change is sorely needed for the system as a
whole).

~~~
tremon
Many have, as it's a staple assignment for technology management courses. Not
sure if many have been published though.

Partly, IPv6 is currently a solution looking for a problem. Its killer
features, larger address space and IPSEC, have been solved in different ways:
IPSEC was retrofitted onto IPv4, NAT greatly surpassed its design intent -- it
was intended as a stopgap measure only.

The other benefits of IPv6 are less critical, or less obvious. The increased
direct address space enables much easier p2p solutions, but because of IPv4 we
now have an Internet that is mostly client-server based. It is impossible to
quantify what "could've been" without NAT. Automatic addressing and peer
discovery have been mostly reimplemented, as easy-to-use DHCP servers in all
consumer modems, and as UPnP/DLNA/APIPA for media devices.

Finally, it took until Windows Vista for ubiquitous consumer-side IPv6 to
appear (yes, *BSD and Linux were faster). Until that time, there was zero
market incentive for any kind of IPv6 deployment.

~~~
netheril96
> It is impossible to quantify what "could've been" without NAT.

It is, because I have lived with multiple levels of NAT before and without NAT
(with both public IPv4 and IPv6 addresses) nowadays. The ability to do P2P is
truly amazing. Now I don't have to wait with the abysmal download speed when
the server is highly congested. Also amazing is the capability to ssh into
machines without any configuration or begging the network administrators who
are nowhere to be found.

~~~
tremon
_The ability to do P2P is truly amazing_

No argument there. But that's not really a quantifiable statement either. In
any case, that's not what I meant: I was referring to the different business
and distributed computing models we might have had, instead of the heavily
centralized models we have now.

Maybe we would have had technologies like bitcoin ten years earlier? Maybe IRC
would have gained a P2P component, and Twitter would never have happened?
That's the kind of things that "could've been" I was thinking of.

------
sly010
That graph with china being red is worrisome. If you extrapolate the trends,
in an other 15 years we will have 2 internets, one for China and one for the
rest of the world, and you will just have to pay for any routing between the
two.

~~~
netheril96
That is already happening even within IPv4 networks. I have to use VPN or
shadowsocks to reach much of the Internet outside China nowadays.

------
takeda
So there's something that is worse than Python 3 adoption ;)

------
mixmastamyk
I'm not a big fan of 128 bit addresses with ipv6, they are too long to read
and write. Does anyone know why 64 bits was not good enough? 64 bit addresses
aren't just twice as good as 32, but 4 billion times more numerous.

~~~
skrause
The main reason for 128 bit addresses is stateless auto configuration which
wouldn't be possible with 64 bit long addresses:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#Stateless_address_autocon...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#Stateless_address_autoconfiguration_.28SLAAC.29)

~~~
mixmastamyk
Hmm, I believe IPX could do that and had 80 bit addresses.

It still seems too large, but there's likely something I'm missing.

------
fapjacks
So basically: "IPv6 still totally unusable."

------
SFjulie1
IPv6 looks like a the x86 64 bit architecture.

On the paper it is better.

In real life it brings only headaches that do not worth the trouble.

And for those who says memory, I answer that it is easy to make a 32 bit CPU
with a 64bit memory adressing.

IPv6 still requires IPv4 to do MPLS. IPv6 has no de facto standard to make
autoconfiguration. IPv4 CPE are already bloated and hardly work with a fair
level of simplicity I hardly know any decent IPv4 sysadmin even in ISP. The
IoT will imply constant connection from your device to the manufacturer while
being connected to your internal network... this is a leak to me. I don't want
my lightbulb to be able to sniff on my mails.

What IPv6 is good for? A lot of KPEX, concentration in ISP sector, a lock in
effect... else I don't see.

~~~
netheril96
x86-64 is quite successful as it is backwards compatible. Are you thinking
about Itanium 64?

~~~
SFjulie1
No I am thinking of the fact that code gets bigger, since assets get bigger,
which results in execution is slower.

Actually there is a whole domain of application for which 64bits coding
results in slower code.

Plus extending memory address space results in slower memory access. L1, L2,
L3 caches are hardly accessible from python/ruby/...(ahhh using register is
sooo fast).

Which in turn results in more watt/instructions.

Nowadays, the IT industry might be the leading one in its contribution to
fossil energy consumption.

Do we need to add coal plants to support the cloud insanity bloating web pages
to 16Mb for applications that are hardly more than 8 operation calculators to
tell you how "green" you are?

I have a degree in ASIC design. Modern x86_64 architecture is insane. It has a
lot of hidden complex mechanic built in that are de facto additional CPUs
inside the CPU for on the fly optimisations (memory+OOP), "security", buses,
plug n'play...

And who pays?

Actual IT industry is literally taxing the masses for something they neither
ask nor need.

The IT is locking consumers in arbitrary choices that results in higher costs.

