It could be '5 to 10 years' before the world finally drags itself away from IPv4

Pretty sure I saw this headline 20 years ago, too...

The world has figured out how to live without IPv6. The pain of switching, along with the fact that we're (still!) finding bugs in IPv6 stacks and interoperability challenges, just isn't worth it. There needs to be some significant benefit to the public other than mere address abundance to make a large-scale transition to IPv6 happen.

Uptake of IPv6 is so random and haphazard from one country to another. In Romania (RDS), I had IPv6 on my fiber connection already in 2010. In Poland (Orange), even in 2020 you can only get IPv6 by specially enabling it in your router’s settings by an undocumented trick, but then the ISP issues a command to your router every 24 hours to drop IPv6 and go back to solely IPv4.

I know if you ask some ISPs how you can permanently enable IPv6, the response is that you need to upgrade to their more expensive business plan. (Surely no one would need IPv6 unless they were running a server, and residential plans aren’t for running servers). Consequently, some ISP seem to feel a financial incentive not to give out IPv6 addresses, and the pessimist in me says that they could continue dragging their feet for these next 5 to 10 years.

Might need to add a 0 to those numbers.

In fact, all the large ISPs and hosting providers are stocking up on IPv4 and buying them at places like ipv4connect.com...

doubt we will ever get rid of IPv4 altogether. Dual stack will probably always have a need for backwards compatibility.

Reminds me of the "this is the year of the Linux Desktop" predictions.

10 years is very optimistic.