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The mistakes and missed opportunities in the design of IPv6
This post does not reflect the views on current, past or future employers. The opinions in this article are my own. This is a series of articles of my musings on why IPv6 failed. Previous article. Most networking protocols over the history of computer networking has failed. What makes up a successful protocol is defined in RFC5218. Personally I have worked on IPv6 standardisation and implementations since 1998. 27 years wasted then. At least I can claim to have learnt something along the way. Wonder what the inventors of ATM, X.25, IPX, DecNet, OSI, Apollo, … feel. :-) IPv6 is at least in good company. For some definition of “failed”, and reserve the right to take an antagonist position, and I do accept that there are valid use cases for IPv6.
They have a significantly higher drop probability in the network, and most importantly outside of a limited domain they have little or not practical use. It allows a host to have a default router configured independently of an on-link global address prefix. Allowed private addresses (including NAT) or much more preferable designed in identity / locator split in IPv6.
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