I think it pretty likely that once we reach 50% it will switch from "That thing that techies care about" to "Something people assume everyone has", and that any remaining ISPs that don't provide IPv6 will rush to get it done.
I'm sure that IPv4 support will continue for a fair while though.
> Any remaining ISPs that don't provide IPv6 will rush to get it done.
You give people a lot of credit. I work at a large ISP/Telco, we just got a new Director of "Core/IP"... in the first meeting the new director attended we started talking about IPv6 initiatives and the new Director interrupted us all and said "Wait. What's IPv6?"
They hire managers and Directors who will do what the people above them say. The people above them have even less technical know-how, so it's not like they can vet potential candidates.
As with https, moving forward has a cost, but at some point, the cost of staying compatible with old protocols is higher. Before the switch, you have to deal with training staff for the new tech. Once the switch starts happening, you need to train the staff to deal with the risks of keeping the old tech.
For example, I find it easier to have an https-only web infrastructure. Too bad for old deprecated browsers who cannot support proper encryption (and therefore become a security risk for me, and a waste of time to support). Dual protocols (v4 and v6) take more time and money to manage. Initial training can be harsh. Some first-gen hardware was terrible. However, now that it's done, I can't wait to switch off IPv4.
I thought that was like the Voyager leaving the solar system story that keeps repeating every few years but never seems to actually happen.
Only meant partly in jest. When they start to get really rare, the price of IPv4 blocks will keep going up, until some institutional holders of large blocks start selling. It could take quite a long time before it's really gone for good.
Because while it might be a lot of effort for the large institutional holders when they've historically allocated stuff assuming they have the whole huge block, eventually the price-cost trade-off will reach a point where the address space is valuable enough.
ISPs are already dropping support for "real" IPv4 and only offering NAT. At the other end, there are already cloud providers that charge extra for an IPv4 address on your server.
A couple of years ago my ISP dropped their usenet servers - not enough people were using them to justify the cost/maintenance effort. I expect we'll eventually see the same thing with IPv4; not for ten or twenty years perhaps, but once "everything" is using IPv6, it becomes a cost center.
Look further down in this thread and there are already users in Germany being signed up on DS-Lite. Their only IPv4 access is behind carrier-grade NAT. Anything that wants to make a direct inbound connection and doesn't want to proxy (VOIP, games etc) will need to support IPv6
I imagine people will start deploying multiple HTTPS sites on a single IPv4 address but with individual IPv6 addresses. People still using only IPv4 on Windows XP with Internet Explorer will not be able to access those sites (no SNI), but they will soon be a tiny minority.
The one thing I gather from that graph is that over weekends, IPv6 use spikes. I assume that this means that networks or devices at companies and schools are lagging behind at using IPv6?
Corporate IT tends to lag in these sorts of things. Given that most people have ISP provided CPE, and that's the only device in their homes, it allows the ISP to have a much easier time migrating that user to IPv6. The rollout mechanisms have been well studied.
On the other hand, corporations tend not to have the same level of skill, and focus in terms of networking as an ISP, like a Comcast, or an AT&T. Additionally, they're not as incentivized to move everyone to IPv6, because often times, it's easier, cheaper, and more realistic to buy some IPs.
Moving to IPv6 at the office is a difficult project for most, as there is still a ton of enterprise gear that's IPv6-less. Even at that, enabling enterprise applications with IPv6 tends to be a massive nightmare. Lastly, the security implications of IPv6 are not well understood by most people in the corporate environment.
Yea, there could be a number of reasons for this.
Companies may not see a need to upgrade to IPv6 just yet, all their internal machines have nat-ed addresses and they have enough public ip addresses.
They use some legacy software / hardware X that doesn't support IPv6 (hey, some companies are still paying Microsoft to support XP).
Until quite recently I haven't heard of anyone having a problem with supporting v4 only. But that time is ending; the first problem I've heard of is a VoIP provider who has problems with customers on DS-Lite. In about three years it's quite possible that IPv4 has the sort of occasional tunnel/reliability issues that IPv6 had five years ago.
"Google works, so it's not my connection at fault, it must be your site that's broken."
The big reason to support IPv6 now is IMO that (all else being equal) it's better to add v6 support when you roll something out than to introduce it later.
At work (a larger enterprise in Europe) we already see quite a bit of pain with IPv4. B2B connections are increasingly not using globally unique addressing anymore, so we often need to use prefix NAT and application level proxies to bridge clashing address space. This in turn is a support nightmare and is hurting reliability.
Our network guys seems to love the extra complexity, though.
I hate VPN-ing into other people's networks, it is such a pain-point. As you say, you have address/space clashes, and all kinds of other (sometimes even security) problems.
It sounds easier than it is, the main issue is scaling. Need to connect to one other person for B2B? Trivial. Two? A little harder. Ten, twenty, fifty, ouch...
In the United States, Comcast is one of the largest ISPs that has deployed IPv6, and they've (purportedly) rolled it out to 100% of their residential customers (with supported CPE). However, they're still working on their IPv6 deployment for business customers (still in trial, availability "any day now"). This could account for a lot of it, especially in the US.
Agreed. Comcast has terrible management, and unreliable (usually bad) customer support, but I've found that their network operations are very good (when they're not applying corporate anticompetitive policies); a couple of their top IPv6 people hang out on the Comcast forum on dslreports.com, and they really seem to care a lot about proper network management.
Has anyone got any idea what the (relatively) big spike on October 4th 2014 was? A quick google revealed it's not some "World IPV6 day" or something (though there was something like that on 2011 which had a next-to-zero impact).
Was there maybe a new phone or console (or an OS update released to either) released?
I would hazard a guess that that was when global routing table hit 512K routes and crashed a few hundred ISP routers worldwide? That might have been earlier in the year though.
Rate-limiting is still easy with IPv6, you just limit whole subnets (e.g. a /64) instead of single IP addresses. I guess Google has figured that out as well.
I actually do believe that this is real traffic. Here in Germany the number of connections with native IPv6 is rising constantly. At home all my devices are always using IPv6 when connecting to Google services because I also have native IPv6. Those 12.26% for Germany look pretty believable.
Also everyone on Unitymedia. Dual stack if you're a lucky older customer, DS lite (CPE has routable IPv6 and NATed IPv4) if you are new or get something changed.
I just noticed that a few weeks ago, with no change in contract. I have a resold Telekom VDSL line, and I was quite pleased to find that I now have a native IPv6 connection with a /56 assigned.
I'd tried some IPv6 settings in my router last year, and 6to4 worked pretty well at that point.
I've noticed similar stats on my own IPv6 enabled sites. Last year a non-tech conference I worked on the registration system for had a similar fraction (of the non-spam paying registrants) signing up via v6.
My ISP here in SF, Webpass, has begun deploying their customers behind an IPv4 NAT with an IPv6 /64 prefix. I think this trend is going to be more common with consumer ISPs. I mind a little bit, since VPN access is impossible on IPv4, but with mobile carriers deploying IPv6 I think I will care less as time goes on.
It is noticeably faster to use IPv6 with Google, something like 4ms vs. 30ms connection times. I'm not sure if it's a more efficient route, or underutilized routers handling the traffic.
Can anyone explain what "latency / impact" means on the per-country graph? I can't quite make sense of it:
United Kingdom: 0ms latency, 0.02% impact
Romania: -10ms latency, 0.01% impact
Bulgaria: 10ms latency, 0.03% impact
Japan: 20ms latency, 0.03% impact
All that I can divine so far is that 20ms appears to be the threshold at which your country will receive a red tint regardless of your adoption percentage.
This seems like a good place to ask--I'm on Time Warner. I have an ipv6 address, and can get to ipv6.google.com, so it seems like everything is in place. But all my web browsing (chrome or ff, Windows 7) defaults to use ipv4 everywhere.
Is there something I need to change on my end? I've got pretty vanilla settings. Thanks!
1. What kind of IPv6 connectivity do you have? If it's not a native deployment, it could be 6rd or 6to4. I believe that some applications/OSes will prefer IPv4 over non-native IPv6 when they have the choice, since the latter will be running through a proxy (and therefore will probably be slower).
2. It could be an OS setting. I think that most recent OSes will prefer IPv6 by default, but I could be mistaken.
3. Application settings could also be in play.
I installed a Chrome extension named "IPvFoo" that adds an indicator in the address bar to tell me whether I'm connecting over IPv4 or IPv6. When I'm at home (Comcast residential, native dual-stack), it shows me connecting over IPv6 a lot of the time, especially when I'm connected to larger sites; in fact, the majority of sites connect over IPv6 at least partially, since many popular services (Google Analytics, Google Fonts, some common CDNs for Javascript libraries) are available over v6.
I spent some time checking into things, and here's what appears to be happening:
1. I do get an IPv6 address from Time-Warner... and it appears to be legit. (It's not the link-local address; it starts with 2605:e000, which is in the Time-Warner block)
2. But... it appears to be non-routable from the general internet. I think this is Time-Warner's fault. But maybe it's my router. I am not sure. Traceroute from http://4or6.com/traceroute?l=en gives me this. (I attempted to obfuscate my real address with XXXX)
#traceroute 2605:e000:xxxx
traceroute to 2605:e000:xxxx (2605:e000:xxxx), 30 hops max, 80 byte packets
1 2607:f2f8:1600::1 (2607:f2f8:1600::1) 1.653 ms 1.597 ms 1.583 ms
2 2001:504:13::1a (2001:504:13::1a) 11.753 ms 11.746 ms 11.732 ms
3 twcable-backbone-as7843.10gigabitethernet17.switch2.lax2.he.net (2001:470:0:2bf::2) 2.618 ms 2.610 ms 2.599 ms
4 2001:1998:0:4::11d (2001:1998:0:4::11d) 3.956 ms 2001:1998:0:4::11b (2001:1998:0:4::11b) 3.477 ms 2001:1998:0:4::11d (2001:1998:0:4::11d) 5.512 ms
5 2001:1998:0:8::83 (2001:1998:0:8::83) 4.090 ms 5.784 ms 2001:1998:0:8::87 (2001:1998:0:8::87) 6.542 ms
6 2605:e000:0:4::41 (2605:e000:0:4::41) 6.753 ms 5.032 ms 5.011 ms
7 2605:e000:0:4::5:7f (2605:e000:0:4::5:7f) 6.859 ms 7.042 ms 7.128 ms
8 * * *
3. Since a recent firmware upgrade, my router detects this problem, and sometimes (but not always) decides to set up a 6to4 tunnel. I am not sure how this works, exactly.
4a. If the router does set up the 6to4 tunnel, I do have IPv6, but as organsnyder says, since 6to4 tunnels suck, the OS prefers to use ipv4.
4b. If the router does not set up the 6to4 tunnel, I have a completely non-functional IPv6.
Why go through all the trouble? Just get a free tunnel from Hurricane Electric (https://tunnelbroker.net/). Their site mentions that they have servers in London.
If anonymity is your goal, then a VPS probably wouldn't be much help—you'd be traced right back to your VPS provider, so you'd still be hoping that they wouldn't divulge your information. Since a VPS is normally on a static IP, it'd be slightly worse than a typical dynamic IP from a residential ISP.
Digital Ocean supports IPv6 in their London DC. But if you just want a tunnel, it's much easier to get one from HE[1], or SixXS[2] than set up your own VPN. It's not anonymous though.
Comcast and Time Warner Cable both have larged wired IPv6 footprints (28% and 12% of their quite sizable customer bases respectively), as do a number of universities.
