Comment by rstuart4133
3 days ago
> yet it is still an obscure tech and will likely end up like IPv6.
Probably. According to Google, IPv6 has a measly 46% of internet traffic now [0], and growing at about 5% per year. QUIC is 40% of Chrome traffic, and is growing at 5% every two years [1]. So yeah, their fates do look similar, which is to say both are headed for world domination in a couple of decades.
[0] https://dnsmadeeasy.com/resources/the-state-of-ipv6-adoption...
[1] https://www.cellstream.com/2025/02/14/an-update-on-quic-adop...
When you remove IoT, those numbers will look very differently.
> When you remove IoT, those numbers will look very differently.
To paraphrase: "when you remove all the new stuff being added, you will see all the old stuff is still using the old protocols". Sounds reasonable, but I don't believe it. These IoT devices usually have the simplest stack imaginable, of many of them implemented from the main loop. IPv6 isn't so bad, but QUIC/http2/http3 is a long, long way from simple.
A major driver of IPv6 is phones, which I wound not classify as IoT. Where I live they all receive an IPv6 address now. When I hotspot, they hand out a routable IPv6 address to the laptop / desktop. Modern Windows / Linux installations will use the IPv6 in preference to the double NAT'ed IPv4 address they also hand out. The funny thing is you don't even notice, or at least I didn't. I only twigged when I happened to be looking at packet capture from my tethered laptop and saw all this IPv6 traffic, and wondered what the heck was going on. It could have been happening for years without me noticing. Maybe it was.
It wasn't I surprise I didn't notice. I set up WiFi access for a conference of 100's of computing nerds and professionals many years ago. Partly for kicks, partly as a learning excise I made it IPv6 only. As a backup plan I had a IPv4 network (behind a NAT sadly, which the IPv6 wasn't) ready to go on a different SSID. To my utter disbelief there no complaints, literally not a single one. Again, no one noticed.
QUIC is really simple for most IOT: Just import the library.
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