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A non-trivial minority of the time, they don't support IPv4 either!

> And still, in the year of our lord 2026, GitHub does not support IPv6.

Especially given that it is now owned by Microsoft, which has been working on IPv6-only (at least on their corporate network) for almost a decade:

* https://blog.apnic.net/2017/01/19/ipv6-only-at-microsoft/

* https://www.arin.net/blog/2019/04/03/microsoft-works-toward-...

Same with Twilio. We have an internal server that does system alerts. We recently moved it to an IPv6 only host, and a few weeks went by and noticed there were no longer receiving alerts.

Turns out we could not connect to Twilio's API which is IPv4 only.

Our university has bad problems with ipv4. Every few days you'll notice some websites being unreachable, including github. Although with their uptime recently, you never know who's to blame...

They supported IPv6 for a short time, but then stopped their experiment.

An excellent reason to move away from Github, I find.

Kinda sorta.

github.com doesn’t have an IPv6 address.

github.io does have an IPv6 address. Indeed, one workaround for getting rate limited when using a carrier NAT with github.com is to have a github.io page and pull data from github.io instead of github.com.

Edit: About a decade ago, all of my hosting had full IPv6 support, and I tried to move over to IPv6. However, there was an issue with Letsencrypt certs not validating over IPv6, so I made my web pages IPv4 only. Recently, I gave IPv6 a go again, and the cert issue has been fixed, so now my webpages finally have both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.

Just found this little site. https://isgithubipv6.web.app/

Maybe we shouldn't even measure percentage adoption and instead just if github has finally adopted..

GitHub should absolutely support IPv6, but until then... transip.eu provide IPv6 addresses which transparently proxy to github.com: https://www.transip.eu/knowledgebase/5277-using-transip-gith...

You'll need to update your DNS server to include those as AAAA records.

Do providers like NextDNS or RethinkDNS allow these sorts of overrides?

The irony of this is that pretty much all they'd have to do to enable IPv6 support is to use Azure Front Door as their CDN. Or... use any other CDN, they pretty much all default to providing IPv6!

Do we know any technical reason for this? Or are we left to think this is somehow a political thing?

Came here to exactly check on this to see if there are any changes on Github side too

Most websites still don't

That was excellent, thanks for recommending it. I particularly liked how it's a pretty factual FAQ, not particularly cheerleading for IPv6 nor saying "IPv6 is a failure, give up on it".

Here is my article that I wrote when I wanted to learn more about IPv6: https://ssg.dev/ipv6-for-the-remotely-interested-af214dd06aa...

EDIT: After reading Tailscale's article, I noticed that I overlooked our neverending dependence to NAT despite that IPv6 seems to eliminate it.

"IPv6 is the next generation of the Internet Protocol (IP), the successor to IPv4."

This is a misconception. It is not the successor to IPv4, it is an alternative. Maybe the alternative is so good it will eventually make the older extinct, but it does not look like that

Nearly all ISPs these days are deploying IPv6 for their mobile networks and core service networks, especially in less developed markets^1. The reason is simple, a cost justification. What doesn't exist is a cost justification for Enterprises to deploy IPv6, and for ISPs to deploy Residential / Corporate Internet IPv6.

IMO with the right market conditions, IPv6 could spread really fast within 6-24 months. For example, most cloud providers are now charging for IPv4 addresses when IPv6 is free. Small changes like that push in the right direction.

^1 https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/04/asia_in_brief/

Apple/iOS is probably one of the biggest individual drivers of IPv6 adoption. They've been requiring that iOS apps work on IPv6-only networks for close to 10 years now

> It has barely hit 50% and it's already plateauing. This adoption rate is ridiculous despite basically all network interfaces supporting it

It's fine. IPv4 and IPv6 can be used at the same time. There's no hurry. Network interfaces support anything as long as both sides agree (nothing stopping you from building your own IPX network over MPLS).

People can move to IPv6 when the IPv4-as-real-estate speculators get out of control, and if IPv6 prevents IPv4 rental prices from going haywire, then it's served a useful purpose.

I saw a news article that said something about India considering moving to IPv6-only? That's going to be interesting if the rest of the world moves to IPv6 and the U.S. doesn't.

> End users shouldn't need to set up NAT64/6to4 tunneling. It should be ISPs doing that to prepare for the transition.

100%

> It has barely hit 50% and it's already plateauing.

Is it plateauing? From the chart it doesn't look that way at all to me.

You could say it's flat between August 2025 and now, but it also was from Jun 2024-Feb 2025, or August 2023-March 2024. There's just a lot of noise to it -- lots of short plateaus or even dips followed by lots of sudden jumps. Indeed, it seems to have a bit of a yearly cycle to it, suggesting we're at the inflection point of another jump upwards.

So it still seems to be growing strongly to me. The rate of growth has slowed maybe the tiniest bit 2024-2026 compared 2018-2023, but I don't see it anywhere close to plateauing yet.

ISPs often fail to do this because there is always someone in the hierarchy who says, "nobody is demanding it."

I think we'll hit a tipping point soon, just like with Python3 - for years and years it seemed almost stalled, then it became easier to start with python3 than python2 and suddenly everyone migrated.

> End users shouldn't need to set up 6to4 tunneling. It should be ISPs doing that to prepare for the transition.

Which is what ISP are doing with 464XLAT deployments. IPv6-mostly networking and IPv4-as-a-service are things that are happening in real world right now.

My German ISP supports it now, which was the limiting factor for me, and a new VPS I just bought also does, so finally I was able to create my first personal AAAA record. I am hoping that we're seeing a tipping point. Again.

Since when was there ever a plan to disable IPv4 on the Internet? Just because IPv6 is around doesn't mean that IPv4 is going to go away.

>> It has barely hit 50% and it's already plateauing.

Well, the curve has got to level-out at 100%.

> Also, notice how Android and iOS don't support turning off IPv4.

You can trivially connect an iOS device via IPv6 only.

> It has barely hit 50% and it's already plateauing.

That makes sense. The majority of IPv6 deployment is mobile.

The next wave of adoption requires ISPs start offering residential IPv6. Once this happens, router manufacturers will innovate around the IPv6 offering as a differentiator, making it easy to deploy by end-users. IPv6 wifi APs will then become ubiqutious and so forth across other services. Has to start with ISPs.

Is there a reason why adoption has been so abysmally slow? Like surely all the big players have updated their networking equipment by now, and surely every piece of enterprise-grade kit sold in the last 20 years has supported v6.

The only arguments I've ever heard against ipv6 that made any sense are that:

1: it's hard to remember addresses, which is mayyyyybe valid for homelab enthusiast types, but for medium scale and up you ought to have a service that hands out per-machine hostnames, so the v6 address becomes merely an implementation detail that you can more or less ignore unless you're grepping logs. I have this on my home network with a whopping 15 devices, and it's easy.

and 2: with v6 you can't rely on NAT as an ersatz firewall because suddenly your printer that used to be fat dumb and happy listening on 192.168.1.42 is now accidentally globally-routable and North Korean haxors are printing black and white Kim Il Sung propaganda in your home office and using up all your toner. And while this example was clearly in jest there's a nugget of truth that if your IOT devices don't have globally-routable addresses they're a bit harder to attack, even though NAT isn't a substitute for a proper firewall.

But both of these are really only valid for DIY homelab enthusiast types. I honestly have no idea why other people resist ipv6.

Comcast, one of the largest residential ISPs in the USA, has almost full IPv6 deployment by default. The majority Verizon Wireless is IPv6 by default. Residential customers in the USA have great access if they just enable the stack.

There is nothing about IPv6 that prevents ISPs from filtering ports for all customers. They almost all actively filter at least port 25, 139 and 445 regardless of the actual transport. So I'm not sure "blocking service hosting" is the actual goal here.

The problem seems to be that all of the large and wealthy nations of the world have made the necessary huge investments into IPv6 while many of their smaller neighbors and outlying countries and islands have struggled to get any appreciable deployment.

It should be a UN and IMF priority to get IPv6 networks deployed in the rest of the world so we can finally start thinking about a global cutover.

Worst migration plan ever.

> It should be ISPs doing that to prepare for the transition.

Yeah, I dont get why more ISPs don't offer carrier-grade NAT64 instead of the typical CGNAT

I don't want IPv6. Why would I? It's like a permanent global cookie. You're uniquely tagged and identifiable on every website you visit.

>it's in their best interest to ensure users can't host services without them.

They'll just keep blocking port 25. IPv6 won't change anything with regards to self hosting.

It's not just mobile networking but residential ISPs in general have better IPv6 support. In the US, Comcast was one of the first big IPv6 deployments, in Europe CGNAT+IPv6 is common in many places.

Meanwhile corporate IT for business and education networks have less incentive to upgrade and typically lag behind in adoption in general.

Residential vs. business. If the graph was hourly and per country, you'd see the same rise every morning and drop every evening (likely by more than 5pp).

Having been messing around personally with getting my own blocks of IP addresses and routing[1] - I've become terrified at the idea of implementing access control based on IP address.

Unless your own organisation in the RR has the IP addresses assigned to you as Provider Independent resources, there just seems to be so many places where 'your' IP address could, albeit most likely accidentally, become not yours any more. And even then, just like domain names, stop renewing the registration and someone else will get them - I was that someone else recently...

[1] AS202858

Anyone who relies on IP filtering for security deserves to have it broken. Change my mind.

If you can't handle sites switching to ipv6 in 2015 (ten years ago) your security plan is garbage.

> providers don't have an easy way to correlate addresses

Yes, they do. It's called DNSSEC.

Thanks to the trend to SASE like Palo Alto GlobalProtect or ZScsler this practice is not a good idea anymore. Speaking of ZScaler, they are still IPv4 only, right?

You can solve this issue if you have one server with ipv6/ipv4 you can run NAT with Jool and connect ipv6 only servers to that. Like Android does.

I wish hosting providers would give you a local routed ipv4 on ipv6 servers with a default NAT server. It is not that expensive I move 10Gbps "easily" and they could charge for that traffic.

The cafe WiFi thing (getting IPv6 only, no ipv4, on a public network) used to happen quite often to me on macOS. I never figured out why, and I haven’t noticed in a while.

great resource. Common crawl is a goldmine

The problem has nothing to do with over engineering, or really anything to do with the actual contents of the IPv6 standard. It is just devilishly hard to make any backwards-incompatible change to layer 3, and address expansion is always going to be backwards incompatible.

CloudFlare Radar has stats for desktop (34%) vs mobile (46%) adoption: https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&groupBy=i...

I was wondering how much is "last mile" between end-user devices and the next hop vs. within cloud networks, but the bit about mobile is a good point.

Yeah, I'm in the same boat. I like the idea of being able to remotely connect to anything on my network, but I know just enough about networking to be dangerous, and don't trust my self to set it up securely, so I have IPv6 disabled on my router. With IPv4, it's physically impossible to mess up the firewall and NAT settings enough to make local devices public.

This was surprisingly complicated for me on Altice/Optimum, which is why my home didn't have IPv6 for a while even after they started provisioning.

We actually have a /128 address only, and had to tweak several settings including enabling IPv6 masquerading (NAT).

I haven't the slightest clue why they didn't give us a block.

You only need to set nothing and it should setup ipv6 on all downstream vlan interfaces. For static prefix I'd you can set ip6hint per vlan interface. For each vlan interface you need a stanza in the DHCP config file. And regarding firewall, as with the default lan zone you might need to add new zones with the vlan interfaces and configure forwarding rules. That's it.

interestingly my ISP, at&t, quietly turned off ipv6. not sure exactly when it happened, i should get around to complaining about it but i hate making phone calls

Dell, HP and Lenovo have had laptops with cellular modems for maybe 15 years at this point.

> It's only a matter of time before laptops get 5G.

So you want laptops to cost <whatever the laptop costs> plus a measly 19.99/month for internet connectivity?

What's wrong with just tethering to my existing phone?

| Macbooks have been rumoured for a while to get cellular modems.

Maybe they are finally coming, however the rumors are older then the iPhone. Example from 2008: https://pcr-online.biz/2008/11/03/3g-macbooks-on-the-way/

Thats quite surprising thing to me and weirdly obvious.

If you are single, have a phone contract, you would need some extra contract for a landline internet and wifi router because thats what a lot of people just do and now they can just add an esim and pay a little bit more.

Interesting that this sounds/feels a lot more right or useful than it did 5 years ago.

I can't imagine a worse privacy nightmare. Always on backdoored baseband in 5G with a unique permanent IPv6 address assigned to the machine. Okay, maybe it could be worse if each user account is assigned its own unique IPv6 perma-cookie.

The regulatory body, ARCEP, has been very proactive since 2002 (!) on IPv6. The recent uptick is due to IPv6 obligations bundled in the 5G spectrum licences.

https://www.arcep.fr/la-regulation/grands-dossiers-internet-...

This is probably not the real reason, but I find it interesting that France had Minitel (^1) before and later had to switch to the Internet, and then later became the fastest country to complete the IPv6 transition. So perhaps they had an engineering culture that was prepared for the possibility they would have to upgrade the entire network on a nationwide scale.

^1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel

Maybe my guess only, but France has its bit of a technological centralization. I mean, a lot of people use internet from operators like "Orange" / "Free", and in contrast to other countries, routers provided by the operators in France do not suck. The routers are OEM, but overall quality you get from them is on-par with Ubiquity/Mikrotik.

This gives operators a benefit of the vertical control for the whole ecosystem - from top to the bottom, including intricate parts of protocols and routing. And France, in contrast to other countries, does not suck here too - operators usually do a good job of meticulously maintaining their assets.

My personal impression is that this is the result of several cultural factors:

1. Ingrained respect of privacy, private property, and a peace of heart as they call it. As a practical result of that, you do not get spammy messages and ads from operators, banks, etc. You may get some, like 3 or 4 discounts/offers in a year. Compare that to other countries where you can easily get 10s/100s messages like that in a single day. In other countries, instead of upgrading the infrastructure, people are busy with spamming each other.

2. The harsh oceanic environment with hurricanes and storms fosters an appreciation for reliability and functionality. It also encourages a certain frugality: every cent matters. As a result, people tend to develop a strong sensitivity to situations where form is prioritized over function, and such approaches are quickly dismissed as impractical. This gives a certain internal freedom of being able to see through things to determine what they are in the long run and not what they appear to be on the surface.

3. French people don't like to overwork outside of working hours. So choosing something like IPv6 over IPv4 seems like a natural forward-looking investment for the future where you can have less maintenance burden and thus you can devote more time to enjoying other things in life.

Having all those things combined, it's not hard to see why France chose IPv6. It's a natural choice there and it's imposed by survival.

P.S. I've spent some time in France, but was born in another country.

I worked with the internet society to mobitor ipv6 adoption for the top million sites ipv6matrix.org it's broken down by country so might answer some of your curiosity

I'm wondering the same thing for India. Not the top but looks surprisingly surprisingly high. Perhaps I'm reading the data wrong.

Technical literacy, hacker culture, and culture of well-considered infrastructure, have been French characteristics - at least, historically.

Has something changed for the worse?

You might be interested in https://tunnelbroker.net/ and https://route64.org/ although the later looks a little shady and I haven't tried them.

A cheap VPS or one with spare bandwidth with > /64 that is properly routed (some providers do NDP for some reason) and a Wireguard tunnel would also get you a simple DIY solution.

Are you with SFR? I also seem to only have a static IPv4 (I don't pay for it, but it's never changed in the lifetime of the connection). I asked for an IPv6 but they said it was not possible/difficult.

Yeah and this distinction explains the fact that because China's Great Firewall blocks Google, this website shows 4.66% adoption as a reflection of that. I think China's IPv6 support rate is actually much higher than that, maybe a little over 50% because of its central initiative to increase IPv6 adoption?

EDIT: Apparently it's 77% https://pulse.internetsociety.org/en/news/2026/01/china-hits...

"The graph shows the percentage of users that access Google over IPv6."

How would Google know what users have the potential for IPv6 if they are not using it?

Right, but in most situations clients will prefer IPv6 if its available, so if they have access, they almost always are using it, at the very least from their local network.

It also means you're excluding China, who has has it as a long-term priority to deploy IPv6 and have made huge strides.

Wouldn’t it be close? AFAIK modern network libraries on modern OSs default to IPv6 when available.

>I explicitly asked about IPv6 connectivity and they said, "yes."

ABC, Always Be Closing.

This proposal is absolutely wild.

Maybe the best anti-scraper/LLM protection is going IPv6 only. I'd do that on my website, but I'm afraid some clients might not connect.

For example, compared to migration from 3G to 4G networks. As I understand, from the launch of 4G to complete shutdown of 3G it took around 12—14 years.

Latin1 to UTF8

Yeah the reality is that the Internet is centralized now. There is no reason for two computers on the internet to connect to each other anymore, as long as you can reach Google/Microsoft/Amazon/CloudFlare, that's all anyone needs.

Just log onto AOL and type in keyword "WALMART" and save! It's friendly and safe.

In theory you can save quite a bit on AWS costs by having instances that can only use v6.

But in reality at the moment there will probably always be at least one thing that only works with v4 a lot of the time.

Incentives are misaligned as well - it saves you money as the EC2 instance user, but the owner of the website you're trying to access has to support v4 anyway so they don't have a big incentive to change anything

Maybe it's time to tax IPv4 usages or holders.

> heavy usage from a small number of IPv4s

Basically, all crawlers.

I recommend going through Hurricane Electric's multiple-choice tests. It's not exactly a how-to guide or course, but it'll mention all of the terms and technologies you need to look up to get things right. They'll even send you a free T-shirt if you make it through all of them.

The most difficult parts for a homelab in my experience is getting Docker to play nicely. All of the other stuff sort of just works these days. Even things like using DHCPv6 prefix delegation to obtain a routable subnet is almost trivial with how well-supported the protocol is with modern networking software.

Cool! Could you give some concrete examples of apps or traffic patterns where you think IPv6 may noticeably improve performance on phones? Are you mainly referring to NAT traversal during connection setup, or to something that also affects traffic after the connection is established?

I think its incredibly ironic actually. The place where IPs are burned through rapidly (internal) is forced to use v4. (and, potentially even a subset of it, RFC1918; likely conflicting with some large company or service if they decide to plumb it together later- or you burn publicly accessible IPs in the limited address space)

But the one interface that touches the internet can use v6: the one with a functionally infinite address space.

I had the same issue a few months ago on AWS. All I want is a server (that pulls a container), a database, and a load balancer. It's all going behind CloudFront so there should be no need to pay for an IPv4 address for any internal machine. Couldn't do it. Since then I saw that there was some movement on IPv6 for RDS but IIRC there was still some other blocker.

And how exactly is your NATed ipv4 address better? This seems backwards.

Most of the chatter comes from the peanut gallery who have no real insight on what ISPs and other large networks are actually doing.

As a sometimes chatterer, it's a mix of complaining about the annoying changes in v6 that weren't just lengthening the address fields, pointing out that the migration is taking forever, and implying a less disruptive design could have rolled out faster.

For a long time, there really was next to no progress. Between the introduction in 1996 and about 2011, there was very little adoption. And since 2012 when pushing really started, we're at about 50% globally, with large variance by country and network type. 15 years between creation and real deployment seems like a lot, and 15 years of deployment getting to 50% also seems likes a lot.

But wikipedia says touch tone dialing was first offered to consumers in the 1960s and didn't become majority until the 1980s, so maybe 30 years isn't that slow.

T-Mobile does: https://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/2014/case-study-t-...

They use 464XLAT, basically NAT64/DNS64 with some extra cooperation on the OS’s part for backwards compatibility with apps that hard-code IPv4. You get only a v6 address, and your OS basically synthesizes an v4 network on your device in cooperation with their NAT64 router. But all the bytes going from your device through to their towers are ipv6. Talking to a v4-only website uses carrier-grade NAT64 when leaving the t-mobile network.

According to https://www.ipv6.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/13_IPv6-M... , Google is.

The author of the RFC is the author of the slides.

To what end though? 4 billion addresses is not enough on its own, even if they were reallocated from hoarders. I think that NAT and especially CGNAT have been very detrimental to the shape of the internet, where it's nearly impossible to self-host a public service without a VPN of some kind. Needing to pay some company for the ability to host a server that isn't behind NAT is a barrier that doesn't need to exist when IPv6 has a nearly limitless number of addresses.

There are 16 /8's in the class E address space that were never allocated, and 19 /8's (by my count) allocated to individual companies. If you waved a wand and returned all of that space to IANA for allocation, you would have staved off IPv4 address exhaustion by... about 3 years.

It officially started becoming scarce in 2011, when IANA, and then APNIC, depleted their IPv4 "free" pools, FWIW. Things have only gotten worse from there.

Cloud computing doesn't mitigate IPv4 issues, it just moves it around. The big cloud providers buy up any IPv4 space they can, leaving less for everyone else. The difference is that they then get to collect rent, by the hour, on any IPs their customers use.

Load balancers...yeah, actually that is a valid approach to reduce IPv4 use, assuming you mean the "reverse proxy" variety of load balancer. Cloudflare's proxy service is doing exactly this, on a pretty huge scale. (CLoudflare can then send the traffic on to an IPv6-only server, regardless of the client's protocol.) The downside is, like cloud, consolidating a lot of infrastructure into the hands of a small number of companies.

This is pretty remarkable, given that RFC 1883 is only 30 years old.

We have enough IPv4 addresses (combined with CGNAT) in Denmark so the providers have no business incentive to spend money on supporting IPv6 :/

Carrier-grade NAT for home connections is pretty rare in Germany. I only know of Deutsche Glasfaser - a fairly new ISP that isn't doing too well.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-wkumari-not-a-dr...

Guess you didn’t read it.

Spain has one of the highest FTTx rollouts in Europe though. My theory is that they just prioritized building fiber and there was no money left for ipv6 transition.

Outside of hobbyist niche uses, sites won't start being hosted IPv6-only. The financialization of IPv4 addresses will simply get worse and be even more pay-to-play than it is now. Amazon raises the price of IPv4 and everyone goes along as a cost of doing business.

Maybe "think of the children."

There might be a child behind the NAT, thus IPv6 requirement.

we did it, boys!

despite the smoothbrain naysayers:

https://circleid.com/posts/20190529_digging_into_ipv6_traffi...

finally, the end of the dark tunnel of NAT is in sight, and the internet will be free once more

IPv4-with-more-bytes is not backwards compatible with IPv4. So you'd have to replace/upgrade every existing network stack, both hardware and software. To get, basically, the same effect as moving to IPv6.

IPv6 is IPv4 with 12 more bytes, right?

I'd make it required that ipv6 for all customers has a higher service guarentee than anyone ipv4. If you don't support ipv6 you can't guarentee anything. give two years to to implement it.

Backward compatibility was never really the problem; the problem is that forward compatibility with ANY successor protocol (without modifying IPv4) is a fundamental impossibility.

But at least a reasonable facsimile eventually came out with NAT64.

(You can also do NAT46, but it requires one IPv4 address for every IPv6 destination you want to be reachable from the IPv4 Internet, so it doesn't scale very well.)

Corporate IT networks have less IPv6 and residential/mobile networks have more IPv6, so on weekdays when people are using Internet at work = more IPv4, weekends when people are using Internet at home = more IPv6. Christmas also has a big bump for the same reason.

Bizarrely, Telefonica doesn't see a need. But, their subsidiaries in LatAM do heaps! And, they do central purchasing.

I wouldn't be so worried about it. It's really hard for something as big as this to really hit 100%. If we hit 80% or thereabouts, we can at least plausibly argue to backwards ISPs that IPv6 is the default and the standard that everyone should reasonably be offering.

Generally: I'm really surprised that Norway is just at 27%. I think I've been with 3 different residential ISPs the last 15 years, and all of them have done IPv6 perfectly well (two nits: I think one required a trivial opt-in, and my current ISP is just giving me /60 which isn't perfect).

Edit: Oops, sorry to my current ISP for shaming them. Some googling told me that one can get a /56 using DHCPv6-PD. I'll try that!

The US has something like 80% of the world's IPv4 addresses, so they feel a lot less pressure to migrate.

Our freaky network admins rolled it out in our global corpo.

Was fun seeing IPv6 running for a few days without problems.

I am rather infuriated that it's impossible to disable IPv4 on my devices, so does that make us even?

  ::203.0.113.42 (tunnels to 203.0.113.42 over v4)
  64:ff9b::203.0.113.42 (translates to v4 at nearest NAT64 point)
  ::ffff:203.0.113.42 (opens a v4 connection via an AF_INET6 socket)

For observers, this draft was posted to HN earlier but quickly flagged and removed because the linked "IPv8" draft is absolute bunk.

See the removed thread for details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47788857

Why do people keep proposing alternatives to IPv6 that are no easier than IPv6 but still require the whole world to start the deployment over from 0%?

Nice idea. Always wondered why IPv6 went so ambitious with the addressing

What shitty ISP operates like that? I frequently see IPv6 have *lower* latency because of fewer middle boxes and fewer hops in general. Your routers in the default free zone shouldn't be close to their TCAM limits with a single IPv4 routing table.