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Why was this downvoted? It’s exactly right.

The reason that IPv6 is so lightly used is that it’s cheaper to use IPv4 + workarounds.

I’m not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing, or making any value judgment about IPv4 vs IPv6.

People and businesses don’t spend money on technology upgrades where the benefit is not measurably better than what they already have.

This is just common sense; no one wants to throw away money.

If you want people to use IPv6, then IPv4 has to fail first. As long as people keep making it work then the benefits of changing will never outweigh the costs.

BTW this is exactly the same situation as clean energy vs fossil fuel, etc. In that situation governments are actively putting their thumb on the economic scales in all sorts of ways. Again, I’m not offering a value judgment, just an observation.



> The reason that IPv6 is so lightly used is that it’s cheaper to use IPv4 + workarounds

Cheaper? Hetzner and other hosts give IPv6 addresses out for free and charge extra for IPv4 addresses.


Most people don’t need a public IPv4 address and can live with CGNAT.

For the relatively small number of people who do need public addresses, renting them from a cloud provider or buying blocks at auction are still economically viable, in comparison to the capital costs of upgrading everything that needs upgrading to support IPv6-only.


And if you want PI addresses, they exist for IPv6 only.




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