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Harry asked: “I have a question about modems. I was looking at the specs of my modem and I noticed that it is not IPv6 compatible. I know there’s a conversion going on from IPv4, and it’s been going on for a long time. Do you think it’s important that I upgrade my modem now to something that’s IPv6 compatible, or will this conversion take a lot more time. In other words, when will this modem be out of business?”
Harry, don’t worry about it. The transition to IPv6 is supposed to be very slow and gradual, there is no end in sight for IPv4 right now, no turn off date.
IPv4 is expected to be turned off eventually, sooner or later IPv6 will be such a huge majority that it won’t make sense to continue to support older devices, but we don’t know when that will be.
The transition to IPv6 is supposed to be very slow and gradual
As things stand right now, many ISPs, especially smaller ones, don’t even support IPv6, so if you switch to an IPv6 modem, you may end up using IPv4 anyway until your service provider manages to upgrade its own technology.
Even if they do use IPv6 now, they probably have no plans to turn off IPv4, which means that upgrading now would get you nothing.
To give you an idea of how slow the transition is, at our studios we’re using Comcast (a very large, very rich ISP), and we’re using a business modem provided by Comcast. You’d think that given the size of the ISP and the fact that they very recently provided us with this new modem we’d automatically be on IPv6, but you’d be wrong. We’re still on IPv4 and those were the default setting on the device.
You’re probably better off waiting until you either need to replace your modem, or your ISP tells you that it will stop working. There’s no real benefit to upgrading today if your current setup is working.