January 2, 2026
Birthday party, no RSVP
IPv6 just turned 30 and still hasn't taken over the world
30 years on, the “new internet addresses” are everywhere—yet nobody knows or cares
TLDR: IPv6 is 30 and still under 50% adoption, despite huge promise and endless addresses. Commenters clash: some say it quietly powers most big-network traffic, others blame ISPs, costs, and confusion for slow uptake—making this a major story for how the internet grows and performs.
IPv6 just hit the big 3-0, promising more internet addresses than stars in the sky, yet Google’s stats say less than half of us actually use it. The community instantly roasted the piece—one reader called the article “short & fluffy”—and then the real drama kicked off in the comments. Some engineers swear IPv6 basically runs the world already, while others say it’s a ghost: present, but invisible.
One network pro claimed that in big companies “at least 75% of Internet traffic is IPv6,” but admitted “virtually nobody knows IPv6.” Another commenter brought Y2K nostalgia: remember when not switching was supposed to break the internet? Meanwhile, a popular blog explainer resurfaced to argue IPv6 was designed by committee, skipped convenience, and made everyday setup confusing—cue memes about IPv6 being Schrödinger’s protocol: both everywhere and unseen.
The villains of the thread? ISPs and corporate bean counters. A user fumed that their provider hoards “static IPv6 prefixes” (stable addresses) for business customers only, despite having “unlimited” space. Others blame NAT—“that trick” where many gadgets share one old address—for making the upgrade feel pointless. The mood swings between “this should be default by now” and “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” with performance fears and training costs keeping the party half-empty even at 30.
Key Points
- •IPv6 was defined in RFC 1883 (Dec 1995) to address IPv4 exhaustion by expanding addresses from 32-bit to 128-bit.
- •Despite expectations, less than half of internet users rely on IPv6 today, per data from Google, APNIC, and Cloudflare.
- •IPv6’s conservative design, lack of backward compatibility, and few features beyond address space limited incentives to adopt it.
- •NAT enabled many devices to share a single IPv4 address, reducing pressure to migrate and aligning with existing expertise.
- •Migration costs, training needs, performance inconsistencies, and lacking dual-stack support in legacy infrastructure hinder adoption.