So is it actually feasible to announce *any* date when IPv6 will be the only connectivity offered to the end user? The thing is that without target dates and deadlines, things will drag on indefinitely. I'll admit I wanted to deliberately put up a challenging statement, but not to troll, really. I genuinely want an answer to "is there a possible date?".
Looking back at Y2K, would all that effort have been put in to kill off old services and tidy up all the cr*p if there hadn't been a fixed deadline? As to the Jan 19 2038 problem, how many of us hope to be retired by then, or will we be dragged out of retirement?! Ok, yes, there's a hell of a lot of legacy equipment in place which could still be there in five years, so perhaps five years isn't near enough for ipv4 use to have fallen into almost disuse. Do "we" still want to be fighting with dual-stack networks, CGNAT, scrabbling to buy ever more expensive IPv4 addresses etc indefinitely? Will 2038 also mark a point where legacy systems have to be retired because of their use of 32 bit math for dates and thus also retire non-ipv6 compliant systems? Eighteen years seems a long way away?