Re: IPv4 flag day

[Mikael Abrahamsson via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org>]

On Tue, 16 Jun 2026, Lu Heng via NANOG wrote:

> Whether one agrees or disagrees with that conclusion, I would be 
> interested in hearing the community's views on the economic incentives 
> surrounding IPv6 deployment and what, if anything, could realistically 
> change them.

My take on it is that for instance the enterprise world has a shortage of 
people who knows how to make everything work, and the people they get can 
barely make IPv4 work plausibly, so asking them to understand IPv6 is a 
big hurdle.

Also, NAT44 actually hides some problems that most IPv4 centric people 
today never had to contend with, for instance return routing for packets, 
and making sure the flow makes it back to the stateful device that it 
passed through.

I started doing networking before NAT came around, so to me IPv6 is a 
return to normalcy, but I've seen plenty of cases where we deployed IPv6 
and then the problem of stateful devices creep up for redundancy. With 
IPv4 NAT44 the packet makes it back to that device naturally, but with a 
stateful IPv6 filtering device, this is now a problem if there are several 
of them, perhaps multi-site.

So I don't have a solution, it's just my observation that a lot of those 
who are affected by IPv4 scarcity also are the ones struggling getting 
enough competence to deploy the solution to this scarcity.

--
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike () swm pp se
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