Summary

IPv6 is a network engineer's dream protocol. It was meant to be. Despite this, IPv6 has continued to languish; products with native IPv6 support have been slow to emerge, and users have been even slower to migrate. Examining this phenomenon reveals the delicious irony of this entire saga. IPv6 was conceived as the ultimate solution to a less-than-gracefully-aging IPv4's myriad problems. Emergency efforts to keep IPv4 alive proved more successful than anyone could have imagined, and the incentive to migrate disappeared, leaving IPv6 out in the colda brilliant solution to a now-nonexistent problem.

The fates of the two protocols remained intertwined, but IPv6 will see broad acceptance only if IPv4 falters and experiences another short-term crisis with its addressing system. The crisis will have to be with its addressing, because we have seen time and again how readily the basic IPv4 protocol suite can be extended to encompass other functions. Thus, no "killer application" is waiting to be discovered that will drive the market's acceptance of IPv6.

In the interim, market acceptance will be limited to specialty network owners and providers, and other niches where IPv6 is the only practical solution.