It's hard to adopt something that schools don't teach. I know someone who graduated from UCI with a CompSci degree with a specialization in networking, just before the COVID19 pandemic began. He recalled that the networking courses he took did not cover IPv6 at all, except to describe the address format (i.e. 128 bits, written as hexadecimal, colon-separated). Everything he learned about IPv6, he had to learn on his own or on the job. A standard that has been published for over two decades, heavily used for over a decade, and critical in the worldwide growth of the Internet, was treated as an afterthought by one of the premier universities in the US.

Obvious disclaimer: This is a sample size of 1, and an anecdote is not data, yada yada. I'm not involved in academia, and have no insight into the adoption of IPv6 in CompSci networking curricula on a broader level.

I recently passed the CCNA again and they really spend a lot more time on IPv6 compared to 15 years ago. It inspired me to go all in this time and configured my home network with a PD allocation from my ISP. I also came up with some fun labs and even got a IPv6 sage T-shirt from Hurricane Electric.

Tbh it’s is a huge PITA with little practical benefit. IPv6 is the Perl 6 of networking.

Many of the big benefits are things that don’t deliver anything that folks are lacking. You also need to understand how you fit in the overall universe more.

I've been of the opinion this is one of those "the art advances one funeral at a time." A lot of people are married to IPv4 and its arcane warts and really, really do not want to deal with IPv6 even though most of the core concepts are almost exactly the same thing, except better. I can't imagine anyone who dealt with V4 multicast ever wanting to go back, and I bet they've memory-holed parts of V4 that simply can't be used anymore and so have been turned off for decades(RIP to RIP). Has anyone seen the automated address assignment in V4 ever work? The usual hint it even exists is that if you see one of those addresses it means something is messed up in your Windows host or the DHCP server died.

People complain about dual stacks and all that but with a modicum of planning it is minimal extra effort. Anything made in the last decade has V4/V6 support and unless you're messing with low level network code, it's often difficult to even know which way you're being routed. Network devices pretty much all support using groups of names or addresses and not hard coded dotted-quad config statements now, and have for a while. And that was good practice on V4 networks too.

Part of it is probably that remembering various V4 magic is easy enough to do but feels complicated enough to be an accomplishment. In V6, there is no point in doing most of that because the protocol has so much more automation of addressing schemes. But if you like those addressing schemes, V6 can do them even better. You can do all sorts of crazy address translation on either the network or host id portion, like giving an internal network a ULA that is magically translated to a public network prefix without any stateful tracking unless that is desirable.

I feel there is some analog to DNS in that regard, people who have gotten used to DNS don't give a damn about host IP addresses but some people seem to really like the idea of a fixed address statement. People also seem to be stuck on the idea that NAT creates some kind of security when that's really the stateful tracking that is required for many-to-few translations (thus making firewalls a common place to implement it), not the translation itself. Similar to certificates versus shared keys, yes, one is more upfront effort but that's because it's solving the problem of the Sisyphean task that is the other.

Meanwhile, I was taught and practiced IPv6 in 2003-5 in engineering school (France).

As of 2024, IPv6 deployment in France was >97% mobile and >98% residential due to not being required for obtaining a 5G radio license (and then v6 simply carried downward to being available on 4G) + every ISP that provides FTTH also providing v6.

https://www.arcep.fr/fileadmin/reprise/observatoire/ipv6/Arc...

Over here IPv6 JustWorks to the point of absolute boredom.

Weird, I graduated from RIT in 2009 with a B.S. in Applied Networking and Systems Administration and we covered IPV6 quite a bit

>> I know someone who graduated from UCI with a CompSci degree with a specialization in networking, just before the COVID19 pandemic began. He recalled that the networking courses he took did not cover IPv6 at all...

I am not doubting you, but I feel this story is too hard to believe without adding further nuances...

MIT 6.829 teaches IPv6 since 2002: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-829-computer-networks-fall-200...

In Portugal and other countries, there are subjects on Computer Science before College or University, and they teach it on High School...

IPv6 was superceded by NAT a long time ago. It will die a slw and quiet death which is why it is now being ignored by training facilities and experts worldwide.