Don't Expect Mass IPv6 Rollout Any Time Soon, Reports Warns

20 years." Authors Brenden Kuerbis and Milton Mueller stressed that the conclusion "is just an educated forecast." The study focused on network operators' incentives to switch. It noted one or two major autonomous systems (AS's) have converted as much as 90 percent of their network to IPv6 in a few markets, while other major AS's in the same market haven't deployed it at all, giving IPv6 deployers no competitive advantage. The study also found that due to the added IPv6 deployment cost, there's a "strong positive correlation" between a country's per capita GDP wealth and country-level IPv6 deployment levels. The good news is that IPv6 is unlikely to "become an orphan" because for some network operators its deployment might make economic sense. The bad news is that deployers must maintain backward compatibility with IPv4, which eliminates many network effects that could create pressure to transition to IPv6. The most likely scenario for greater IPv6 rollout is deployment costs might shrink as legacy infrastructures are taken out of production and software incompatibilities are resolved, they said. IPv4 address scarcity could push the world into convergence since the rising price of such numbers and operational costs of network address translation systems spur IPv6 rollout. It's also possible big cloud and content providers could leverage their position to prod the rest of the world to move to IPv6 if there were a major economic benefit to doing so, but neither that benefit nor the method they would use to facilitate convergence is clear. Given the vast number of countries with no discernible IPv6 deployment, concentration in developing nations, and the presence of many enterprise networks that don't need to grow, it's hard to envision a clean convergence on IPv6 any time soon, the report found.