Comment by hamdingers
5 days ago
I'm not sure you understand what you're proposing. If you end IPv4 support on your product, all you're doing is banning the users on ISPs that don't have IPv6 support.
The people feeling the pain would not be in any position to fix the problem, and their experience will be that your site is down which leads to support burden and reputation risk for your product. If your support tells me to switch ISPs I'm going to roll my eyes and find another product that works.
No, but imagine if Google, Meta and Netflix all publicly agreed to stop supporting IPv4 in X years.
_Everybody_ would rush and make sure to switch everything to IPv6.
Just thinking of the mountains of ewaste that decision would produce makes me ill.
There is very little hardware that would actually be ipv6 incompatible. We're talking network equipment from 15+ years ago, which is also obsolete because it's 1Gbps at 10x the power usage of a 10gbps switch.
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Almost every network in existence runs on layers of tunnelling, so you can run arbitrary protocols over fixed hardware. We tunnel IP over Ethernet and then we don't have to replace our switches to use new IP versions or features. Most clouds use VXLAN. Many ISPs actually tunnel your IPv4 traffic over a purely-IPv6-only network, to a specific device whose job is to deal with legacy IPv4. The reverse is also possible if you have a network that can only handle IPv4.
If they set the deadline in 10 years, there would be (smaller) mountains generated in that period anyway.
I interpreted it to be about vendor contracts. Suppose you're setting up a new thing and you have a choice of vendors. They're all about the same but one of them supports IPv6. You're more likely to pick that one.