Migrating to Ipv6 — The role of basic coordination

The need for a larger Internet address space was acknowledged early on, and a solution (IPv6) standardized years ago. Its adoption has, however, been anything but easy and still faces significant challenges. The situation begs the questions of “why has it been so difficult?” and “what could have been (or still be) done to facilitate this migration?” There has been significant recent interest in those questions, and the paper builds on a line of work based on technology adoption models to explore them. The results confirm the impact of several known factors, but also provide new insight. In particular, they highlight the destabilizing effect of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) offering competing alternatives (to IPv6), and demonstrate the benefits of even minimum coordination among them in offering IPv6 as an option. The findings afford additional visibility into what affects technology transition in large systems with complex dependencies such as the Internet.