12 ms·

IPv6 breaks the 25% barrier

289 points by AndrewDucker 8y ago

nik736 8y ago
Would be interesting to know how much of those are bots.
- organsnyder 8y ago
  Any reason to suspect that it wouldn't be a similar percentage as IPv4 traffic?
  - iMerNibor 8y ago
    Only reason I can think of is it's way easier to get loads of ips to bypass rate limits with ipv6 than it is with ipv4
    - wongarsu 8y ago
      Which is only useful in the narrow case in which your target supports IPv6 and doesn't treat each /64 block as one address for the purposes of rate limiting. This combination seems quite rare.
      - LaGrange 8y ago
        Why would you think it's rare? I've seen places running multiple projects were developers were barely aware that the sysadmins gave everyone an IPv6 address, and therefore the rate limiting has to be IPv6-aware. It's trivial to fix once it becomes a problem (at least in our case it was), but I wouldn't expect it to be an uncommon mistake.
      - mgliwka 8y ago
        It’s pretty easy to acquire blocks larger than /64.
    - aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
      It would be trivial to rate-limit the whole subnet then.
      - throwaway2048 8y ago
        Maybe, but that does not mean a lot of ISPs haven't done that.
    - pilif 8y ago
      if you rate-limit, you should probably be rate-limiting on the /64 prefix and those are about as hard to get as individual v4 addresses.
- pilif 8y ago
  Seeing that IPv4 and IPv6 aren't interoperable and seeing as 75% of the internet is still running on IPv4 and assuming that the amount of v6 only hosts is absolutely minuscule, I would say that adapting and then running a bot on v6 is absolutely not worth it yet at this time.
kolderman 8y ago
Bullshit.
- Majestic121 8y ago
  Any data to support that claim, or to assume the claim above cannot be trusted?
- darren_ 8y ago
  Here’s the paper outlining the methodology https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub36240 https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub36240 (I imagine some specifics have changed in the past 8 years but I believe the basic concept is still pretty similar)
nodja 8y ago
I'd like to see a per ISP distribution. I gather that the majority of v6 adoption is by cellphone ISPs.
- _trampeltier 8y ago
  In switzerland, there is (still) no IPv6 from any cellphone provider.
  - jonaswi 8y ago
    I was working for one of the "big" 3 planning the rollout of IPv6 in their cellphone network. They stopped the project due to budget concerns. Doesn't seem to be too high of a priority for them.
    - YouKnowBetter 8y ago
      Only the police is driving ipv6 hard in the carrier market (since tracing back connections via CGN is hard if not impossible). There is little to no incentive to change a well working network, it makes (business) sense to introduce v6 in the upcoming G5 but not in the running setups.
- ggm 8y ago
  https://stats.labs.apnic.net/v6pop https://stats.labs.apnic.net/v6pop
- virtuallynathan 8y ago
  Here ya go: https://www.akamai.com/us/en/about/our-thinking/state-of-the-internet-report/state-of-the-internet-ipv6-adoption-visualization.jsp#networks https://www.akamai.com/us/en/about/our-thinking/state-of-the...
benbristow 8y ago
And still no signs of support from Virgin Media...
- AndrewDucker 8y ago
  Not _no_ sign. There are teeny-tiny signs: https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/QuickStart-set-up-and/IPv6-support-on-Virgin-media/m-p/3851879#M111442 https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/QuickStart-set-up-and/I...
- q3k 8y ago
  Virgin Media in IE certainly supports IPv6. Used it for over four years.
patrickg_zill 8y ago
So from what I understand, when I use my tmobile phone over 4g,I don't have an ipv4 address that is routable. So I am basically NATed to ipv6. Is Google including this kind of mobile traffic? I would guess that they are.
- akvadrako 8y ago
  Normally this means if your phone supports IPv6 then you will actually be connecting with Google over IPv6 and if you can only use IPv4 then it's be tunnelled, v4 → v6 → v4. So the stats should be accurate.
- zamadatix 8y ago
  "So from what I understand, when I use my tmobile phone over 4g,I don't have an ipv4 address that is routable." T-Mobile is IPv6 only, you will have no IPv4 address assigned to your phone. "So I am basically NATed to ipv6." Other way around, your IPv6 connection is NATed to IPv4 via one of DNS64 or NAT64. "Is Google including this kind of mobile traffic? I would guess that they are." Yes, but maybe not in the way you're thinking if I'm reading your comment correctly. The IPv6 only portion is just INSIDE T-Mobile, when you need to leave T-Mobile to access services you will be using v6 if the services support v6 and v4 if the services support v4. Since Google is measuring this by how you connect to Google and most Google services are v6 enabled then you'll be counted as v6 properly. For the ones that aren't v6 enabled you'll be counted as v4 properly as they are measuring how you go over the general internet not how you traverse a private network.
  - patrickg_zill 8y ago
    My phone shows both an IPv6 address and, 192.168.0.x IPv4.
    - MattSteelblade 8y ago
      That 192.168.0.X address in an IPv4 private address. I'm assuming your phone is connected to Wi-Fi.
hannob 8y ago
If it continues to be deployed at that speed then I'm sure we're fast track on being able to use IPv6 in practice within the next 1000 years.
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MrQuincle 8y ago
Why this pattern? From for example Jan to July 2018 there are 27 "cycles" - probably weeks. They go from say 18% to 22% in a week in a regular pattern. Peaks are sharper than the valleys. Are those weekends? Is there more use of IPv6 in the weekend?
- majidazimi 8y ago
  > Is there more use of IPv6 in the weekend? Most probably yes. Since IPv6 is deployed more on consumers side rather than enterprises. So it's not surprising that over the weekend IPv6 traffic hits a peak.
  - djsumdog 8y ago
    That makes a lot of sense. If you move to a new house and get a new router from your ISP, you're not going to notice or have to reconfigure a bunch of stuff if you're an average home user, for IPv6 (unless you're one of the people here on HN and have a complex network topology). By default, most ISP routers firewall all IPv6 traffic (and IPv4 is implicitly firewalled via NAT). In an enterprise environment, dual stack support can get a lot more tricky and you need to ensure firewalls are property configured, or else regular workstations can be accessible via the public network.
- Faaak 8y ago
  Yes. Home connections have more IPv6 integration than businesses that have to configure their firewalls, etc.
vahno 8y ago
Heh. The only reason things are the way they are now is that the proponents of IPv6 were some cocky idiots who believed transition systems were not necessary because IPv6 was the best thing since sliced bread and IPv4 was going to implode anyway. Looks like they've been proven wrong. ISPs are happily using CG-NAT, all services are being adapted to that (moving away from p2p like Skype did) and end users don't care too much. Ouch!
- pilif 8y ago
  > ISPs are happily using CG-NAT I wonder how "happily" they are using CG-NAT. NAT is inherently stateful and keeping track of that state becomes more expensive as the amount of hosts behind the NAT is increasing. Running CG-NAT at scale is complicated and resource-intensive, so I'm totally willing to imagine that it's better long-term value for a carrier to switch to IPv6 than to expand CG-NAT.
  - AstralStorm 8y ago
    You cannot for now just stop providing the CG-NAT, not when so much of the Internet is still v4 only. V6 deployment will reduce the load on it though.
  - vahno 8y ago
    ISPs don't usually care too much about long-term value. When most of your core network is IPv4-only, getting some CG-NAT equipment is indeed cheaper than buying a completely new core network.
  - londons_explore 8y ago
    The cost of maintaining the state tables used to be a concern in the ninties... Right now, my laptop has 4 open TCP sockets, and my phone has 3. Even assuming the average user has 50 sockets open, and assuming you are an ISP with 300 million users, that's still only 175 gigabytes of RAM. The total cost is under $1000, or peanuts for what would be the worlds largest ISP.
    - 8y ago
QUFB 8y ago
Google's own GCE still doesn't have IPv6 support on the instance level: https://googlecloudplatform.uservoice.com/forums/302595-compute-engine/suggestions/8518246-support-ipv6 https://googlecloudplatform.uservoice.com/forums/302595-comp...
- pilif 8y ago
  I'm a huge fan of IPv6 as it's a huge contributor to ensure the continued openness of the internet. Also, I'm in the privileged position of having a native dual-stack provided by my ISP, so I have native IPv4 and IPv6 both at home and in the office. And yet, even in this position, I think having IPv6 native inside of a production network isn't absolutely necessary (our production env runs in the RFC1918 space too even though v6 would be available at both ends): Access to the private production network should all happen over an encrypted and authenticated VPN and all access form the production network to the public network (if needed at all) should go through a filtering proxy server. Which means that the addressing used in your internal network becomes completely irrelevant and can easily be IPv4. This only becomes an issue once you need more hosts than the /8 offered by the 10/8 RFC1918 network, but the days when you need (and can afford) more than 16.7M nodes on a cloud computing provider are probably still a ways off. If you want instance level IPv6 in order to access an instance directly or in order to access a resource directly, you're probably doing something wrong. Then again, as services become v6 only (which will still be a few years off) and you need to access them from your production network, then your frontend proxy will of course need access to the v6 network. At that point, yes, instance level v6 becomes necessary too.
  - lisper 8y ago
    > the days when you need (and can afford) more than 16.7M nodes on a cloud computing provider are probably still a ways off And the days when you need 16M nodes all of which need to talk to each other directly are probably even further off. (In fact, I would go even further and say that if you find yourself ever facing that situation you've done something badly wrong in your architectural design.)
  - agwa 8y ago
platz 8y ago
As a web user, the ipv6 internet is basically Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia.. and freenode. that's pretty much it.
- deleted 8y ago
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- ggm 8y ago
  LinkedIn. Cloudflare. Akamai. Fastly. the CDNs can't enable webs who dont sign a consent. But.. you kinda need to look a bit harder.
  - jgrahamc 8y ago
    Cloudflare enables IPv6 by default: https://blog.cloudflare.com/always-on-ipv6/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/always-on-ipv6/
    - ggm 8y ago
      Good point. +1 for CloudFlare
varshithr 8y ago
How is India so far ahead in IPv6 adoption?
- AndrewDucker 8y ago
  Because with IPV4 addresses getting ever more expensive[1] going straight to IPV6 for as much as possible, and placing everything else behind a provider-wide NAT saves you a lot of money. And in India they're trying to modernise as cheaply as possible. [1]https://www.ipv4auctions.com/ https://www.ipv4auctions.com/
  - varshithr 8y ago
    Is it usually cellular ISP that first adopt IPv6? Because there's been a new disruptive player in telecom space called Jio and I am guessing they are behind this rise in IPv6 popularity.
    - bluGill 8y ago
      Yes, buying IPv4 address is expensive today. If you have been an ISP for years there is no problem because you bought your IPv4 addresses at yesterday's low prices. If you are a new ISP you pay today's high prices - but ipv6 is nearly free so you roll that out to save money.
    - tambre 8y ago
      Yes, but not always. In my country (Estonia) the biggest ISP (Telia) provides IPv6 for home connections, but not on the mobile network. As for Reliance Jio, they have over 300 million IPv6 users, with a total IPv6 adoption of 88% [0][1]. [0] http://www.worldipv6launch.org/now-we-are-six/ http://www.worldipv6launch.org/now-we-are-six/ [1] http://www.worldipv6launch.org/apps/ipv6week/measurement/images/graphs/RELIANCEJIOINFOCOMMLTD.pnghttp://www.worldipv6launch.org/apps/ipv6week/measurement/images/graphs/RELIANCEJIOINFOCOMMLTD.png http://www.worldipv6launch.org/apps/ipv6week/measurement/ima...
    - azernik 8y ago
      Even in the US, I believe the first large-scale IPv6 rollouts were by Verizon and Sprint.
okket 8y ago
dig +short aaaa news.ycombinator.com [no output]
- djsumdog 8y ago
  I use the SixOrNot browser extension to see which sites have IPv6 enabled (and to test the IPv6 on my own website). Yep, YC has been IPv4 for a good long while.
  - tambre 8y ago
    There's also IPvFoo[0] for those on Chrome (it supports Firefox too, but is a bit buggier there). [0] https://github.com/pmarks-net/ipvfoo https://github.com/pmarks-net/ipvfoo
- tambre 8y ago
  They're working on it.
JustSomeNobody 8y ago
Why was there a barrier? I mean what was at the 25% mark that prevented surpassing it?
- bluGill 8y ago
  If you look at the graph, a year ago we were at 15%, so the it doesn't seem like there is a barrier, just growth finally hit that mark. There may well be a barrier in the future, but so far there isn't any sign of one.
Ambroos 8y ago
I wonder when a country is going to overtake Belgium in IPv6 adoption. Belgium has been slightly above 50% IPv6 traffic to Google for quite a while now, thanks to major ISPs switching to native dual-stack setups (and those ISPs being in full control of home networks in general). It seems that we in Belgium are somewhat stuck at this rate though. Consumer routers behind ISP modems that only provide IPv4, enterprises not adopting IPv6, mobile networks not adopting IPv6 (all IPv4 only with CGNAT if I'm not mistaken), ...
- jgrahamc 8y ago
  Based on Cloudflare traffic data we see this over the last 7 days: US 39.56% IN 39.03% BE 36.97% IE 36.23% MY 30.55% DE 28.24%
  - Ambroos 8y ago
    Huh, interesting! I wonder where the discrepancy comes from.
    - chimeracoder 8y ago
      > Huh, interesting! I wonder where the discrepancy comes from. Probably because the Cloudflare data is percentage of traffic (e.g. total requests), and the Google data is percentage of users. Mobile traffic is more likely to be IPv6, and that would skew the numbers.
      - ecnahc515 8y ago
        Yeah, cloudflare sees a lot of backend systems too (servers); whereas Google probably gets more from (and is reporting on) devices attached to humans.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  https://blog.cloudflare.com/ipv6-in-china/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/ipv6-in-china/ There are some large countries out there. Note that according to my sibling comment, Belgium isn't #1, or above 50%, right now.
tomschlick 8y ago
Verizon FIOS seems to have given up any hope at implementing IPv6 :(
- acct1771 8y ago
  What makes you say that?
  - tomschlick 8y ago
    It's been 7+ years since they said they were implementing it and I haven't seen any users post that they have IPv6 enabled on FIOS. Also customer support says they dont support it and dont know if/when they would be (I asked when I was ordering 4 months ago).
- philg_jr 8y ago
  Seriously...its a shame. Comcast's dual stack is impressive. I've been debating about moving back to Comcast just for this reason (in the rare part of the country where I actually have a choice of two decent providers). I've asked a few different CSR's to mention up the chain about losing a potential customer over this, but I doubt anyone cares, especially since I haven't talked to a CSR that actually knows what ipv6 is. I've "heard" the issue is due to Verizon's old peering agreements.
- tambre 8y ago
  They started rolling out IPv6 in a couple areas a few weeks ago [0]. [0] https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r32136440-Networking-IPv6-working https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r32136440-Networking-IPv6-w...
  - tomschlick 8y ago
    Yeah I just stumbled upon that a few minutes ago. Hopefully it's the real deal this time.
  - philg_jr 8y ago
    oh wow, thanks for this! I gave up hunting for info after a few years ;)
sigi45 8y ago
I got my ipv6 activated through a web forum from my isp (not even a small one) and writing one of the moderators a PM with my customer id :D That was 3 years ago =)
- cptskippy 8y ago
  Comcast has had IPv6 enabled for all supporting devices since at least 2012. * I've been running two IPv6 hosts without any issues since then.
  - deathanatos 8y ago
    I'm also a Comcast customer, but I'm nearly certain I didn't get an IPv6 deployment until at least 2013/2014; I remember looking at their rather hidden signup form for beta testing IPv6 in ~2012, and I remember it being a rather long wait after that before it finally happened. (Some places definitely were seeing initial rollouts around that time, but it was a far cry from "all".)
    - cptskippy 8y ago
      I guess they officially started rolling it out in 2012. I'm in Atlanta and I noticed my modem's IP mode flip to "IPv6 Only" sometime in 2011. I've been hosting from two different machines since then and about 30% of my network traffic is IPv6.
brian_herman__ 8y ago
IPv6 goes up on the weekends according to this graph?
- remus 8y ago
  Total guess, but might be better adoption of IPv6 amongst consumer ISPs comapred to business ISPs?
gfiorav 8y ago
Late to the party but: Friendly reminder that IPv6 by default uses your mac address as part of your address and hence you are recognizable to any server in the world to track you around.
- nerdponx 8y ago
  I didn't know this. Is there an alternative?
  - gfiorav 8y ago
    From another response: https://superuser.com/questions/243669/how-to-avoid-exposing-my-mac-address-when-using-ipv6 https://superuser.com/questions/243669/how-to-avoid-exposing...
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- dddddaviddddd 8y ago
  This is no longer the default on Mac and Windows at least: https://superuser.com/questions/243669/how-to-avoid-exposing-my-mac-address-when-using-ipv6 https://superuser.com/questions/243669/how-to-avoid-exposing...
  - gfiorav 8y ago
    Nice! Thanks for the link. Been some time since my telco years!
- philg_jr 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#SLAAC_privacy_extensions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#SLAAC_privacy_extensions
- Symbiote 8y ago
  Extremely late – this hasn't been the case since Mac OS 10.7 (2010) and Windows XP SP2 (2004).
exabrial 8y ago
Amazing how the companies that have the biggest interest in tracking users also are pushing ipv6 the hardest.
- Oowee1Ee 8y ago
  IPv6 does not really help with user tracking. IPv6 privacy extensions rotate the suffix your browser uses for outgoing connections on a daily basis. And it's enabled by default on most operating systems. It was somewhat broken for a while on windows 10, but they fixed that in march.
  - chicob 8y ago
    But shouldn't the rotation take place connection-wise instead of on a daily basis? If a user browses with a given address and gets identified by one specific agent that shares that information with 3rd parties (e.g. a social network that collects and shares users' IP addresses), every time that happens the then generated new browsing data will have a solid past reference to which it will be added, thanks to that one correct identification.
  - saana 8y ago
    Most ISPs have dynamic IPv4 addresses, but IPv6 removes that necessity. This WILL help tracking.
    - paulie_a 8y ago
      They might consider them dynamic but in 18 years the only time they ever changed was when I actually switched providers. They were essentially static IP addresses. With one ISP it was the same for 5-6 years.
      - saana 8y ago
        Depends on your ISP, no? I've been in a few and for most of them I would have a different IP just by rebooting my router.
alpb 8y ago
Why was 25% a barrier? Will it get higher adoption now that it has passed the "barrier"?
- wongarsu 8y ago
  It's an arbitrary number that looks nice and can be used to generate publicity for IPv6.
  - tomschlick 8y ago
    Also, it can be used as a selling point to stakeholders. Much easier to advocate for when > 25% of traffic is using it than say 10%
PaulAJ 8y ago
Why the extra 5 percentage points every weekend?
- tambre 8y ago
  Because of people not working. IPv6 deployement on consumer internet providers is much higher than those of corporate environments. Lack of IPv6 on corporate networks isn't very surprising, considering how hard/annoying enabling it is for business connections [0]. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ipv6/comments/9jxp2c/isps_and_business_connections_rant/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ipv6/comments/9jxp2c/isps_and_busin...
- MartianSquirrel 8y ago
  I would believe it's because users are connecting in bigger proportions from their smartphones/home networks on weekends, compared to office networks during the week.
mrfusion 8y ago
Obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/865/ https://xkcd.com/865/
intopieces 8y ago
Are there any VPN services that don't have IP leaks for IPv6? I gave up and disabled it last time I investigated this issue.
TekMol 8y ago
My websites do not support IPv6. Is there any incentive for me to make them support it?
- the8472 8y ago
  CGNAT tables can become saturated, making new IPv4 connections flaky while v6 remains reliable. Thus you would improve user experience.
  - TekMol 8y ago
    How would the user notice that? I don't have the feeling something is unreliable. Similar for HN. It also does not support IPv6. From my experience it is in the 99 percentile of websites when it comes to reliability. Aka it works pretty much all the time. Better then almost every other website.
    - the8472 8y ago
      That's your experience, which just means you don't run into saturated CGNATs. For those affected ipv6 sites provide fewer connection drops. > How would the user notice that? Initial connections taking multiple TCP syn retries leading to an initial stall or random assets from 3rd party sites or subdomains not being loaded which can break sites in many ways.
jimmaswell 8y ago
Parents' laptop recently had an inscrutable problem where only a handful of sites worked. Turned out to only be able to load ipv6 websites. On virtually every Google result while fixing the issue, the only way to see the contents was from Google's cache, so it seems like server side adoption is still pretty scarce.
- ridgewell 8y ago
  Did you find out what the issue was in the end? Was it because the IPv4 adapters were disabled? Server side adoption is honestly not that bad. Quite a few major datacenters implement IPv6, but people don't set their A records or slightly modify their config for an IPv6 interface. Cloudflare provides a temporary proxy solution in that it offers IPv6, but it isn't really true IPv6.
  - jimmaswell 8y ago
    I believe it was the ipv4 adapters being disabled, or something else being disabled or set wrong in the adapter settings. No idea how it gets like that in the first place, but apparently it's a problem that's happened to other people often enough for there to be a few threads about it on various support forums.
Rexxar 8y ago
I would have expected an S-curve with an inflexion point at 50% but it seems to have already happened. We will probably have IPV4 for a long time.
derangedHorse 8y ago
It looks like the problem of unique digital addressing will only get harder as more and more people are introduced to the internet. I wonder what will come after IPv6...
pasbesoin 8y ago
I like NAT and the associated partial anonymity it can provide. (At least, you may have to hit up multiple organizations, maybe in different countries, to trace the endpoint(s).) I'm not looking forward to IPv6 enabling/escalating yet another factor in tracking everything and everyone, online. Maybe this is a grossly (as in, large) wrong and ill-informed perspective, on my part. If so, please disabuse me of it. I remain concerned.

289 points by AndrewDucker 8y ago

nik736 8y ago

Would be interesting to know how much of those are bots.

organsnyder 8y ago
Any reason to suspect that it wouldn't be a similar percentage as IPv4 traffic?
- iMerNibor 8y ago
  Only reason I can think of is it's way easier to get loads of ips to bypass rate limits with ipv6 than it is with ipv4
  - wongarsu 8y ago
    Which is only useful in the narrow case in which your target supports IPv6 and doesn't treat each /64 block as one address for the purposes of rate limiting. This combination seems quite rare.
    - LaGrange 8y ago
      Why would you think it's rare? I've seen places running multiple projects were developers were barely aware that the sysadmins gave everyone an IPv6 address, and therefore the rate limiting has to be IPv6-aware. It's trivial to fix once it becomes a problem (at least in our case it was), but I wouldn't expect it to be an uncommon mistake.
    - mgliwka 8y ago
      It’s pretty easy to acquire blocks larger than /64.
  - aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
    It would be trivial to rate-limit the whole subnet then.
    - throwaway2048 8y ago
      Maybe, but that does not mean a lot of ISPs haven't done that.
  - pilif 8y ago
    if you rate-limit, you should probably be rate-limiting on the /64 prefix and those are about as hard to get as individual v4 addresses.
pilif 8y ago
Seeing that IPv4 and IPv6 aren't interoperable and seeing as 75% of the internet is still running on IPv4 and assuming that the amount of v6 only hosts is absolutely minuscule, I would say that adapting and then running a bot on v6 is absolutely not worth it yet at this time.

kolderman 8y ago

Bullshit.

Majestic121 8y ago
Any data to support that claim, or to assume the claim above cannot be trusted?
darren_ 8y ago
Here’s the paper outlining the methodology https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub36240 https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub36240 (I imagine some specifics have changed in the past 8 years but I believe the basic concept is still pretty similar)

nodja 8y ago

I'd like to see a per ISP distribution. I gather that the majority of v6 adoption is by cellphone ISPs.

_trampeltier 8y ago
In switzerland, there is (still) no IPv6 from any cellphone provider.
- jonaswi 8y ago
  I was working for one of the "big" 3 planning the rollout of IPv6 in their cellphone network. They stopped the project due to budget concerns. Doesn't seem to be too high of a priority for them.
  - YouKnowBetter 8y ago
    Only the police is driving ipv6 hard in the carrier market (since tracing back connections via CGN is hard if not impossible). There is little to no incentive to change a well working network, it makes (business) sense to introduce v6 in the upcoming G5 but not in the running setups.
ggm 8y ago
https://stats.labs.apnic.net/v6pop https://stats.labs.apnic.net/v6pop
virtuallynathan 8y ago
Here ya go: https://www.akamai.com/us/en/about/our-thinking/state-of-the-internet-report/state-of-the-internet-ipv6-adoption-visualization.jsp#networks https://www.akamai.com/us/en/about/our-thinking/state-of-the...

benbristow 8y ago

And still no signs of support from Virgin Media...

AndrewDucker 8y ago
Not _no_ sign. There are teeny-tiny signs: https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/QuickStart-set-up-and/IPv6-support-on-Virgin-media/m-p/3851879#M111442 https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/QuickStart-set-up-and/I...
q3k 8y ago
Virgin Media in IE certainly supports IPv6. Used it for over four years.

patrickg_zill 8y ago

So from what I understand, when I use my tmobile phone over 4g,I don't have an ipv4 address that is routable. So I am basically NATed to ipv6. Is Google including this kind of mobile traffic? I would guess that they are.

akvadrako 8y ago
Normally this means if your phone supports IPv6 then you will actually be connecting with Google over IPv6 and if you can only use IPv4 then it's be tunnelled, v4 → v6 → v4. So the stats should be accurate.
zamadatix 8y ago
"So from what I understand, when I use my tmobile phone over 4g,I don't have an ipv4 address that is routable." T-Mobile is IPv6 only, you will have no IPv4 address assigned to your phone. "So I am basically NATed to ipv6." Other way around, your IPv6 connection is NATed to IPv4 via one of DNS64 or NAT64. "Is Google including this kind of mobile traffic? I would guess that they are." Yes, but maybe not in the way you're thinking if I'm reading your comment correctly. The IPv6 only portion is just INSIDE T-Mobile, when you need to leave T-Mobile to access services you will be using v6 if the services support v6 and v4 if the services support v4. Since Google is measuring this by how you connect to Google and most Google services are v6 enabled then you'll be counted as v6 properly. For the ones that aren't v6 enabled you'll be counted as v4 properly as they are measuring how you go over the general internet not how you traverse a private network.
- patrickg_zill 8y ago
  My phone shows both an IPv6 address and, 192.168.0.x IPv4.
  - MattSteelblade 8y ago
    That 192.168.0.X address in an IPv4 private address. I'm assuming your phone is connected to Wi-Fi.

hannob 8y ago

If it continues to be deployed at that speed then I'm sure we're fast track on being able to use IPv6 in practice within the next 1000 years.

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MrQuincle 8y ago

Why this pattern? From for example Jan to July 2018 there are 27 "cycles" - probably weeks. They go from say 18% to 22% in a week in a regular pattern. Peaks are sharper than the valleys. Are those weekends? Is there more use of IPv6 in the weekend?

majidazimi 8y ago
> Is there more use of IPv6 in the weekend? Most probably yes. Since IPv6 is deployed more on consumers side rather than enterprises. So it's not surprising that over the weekend IPv6 traffic hits a peak.
- djsumdog 8y ago
  That makes a lot of sense. If you move to a new house and get a new router from your ISP, you're not going to notice or have to reconfigure a bunch of stuff if you're an average home user, for IPv6 (unless you're one of the people here on HN and have a complex network topology). By default, most ISP routers firewall all IPv6 traffic (and IPv4 is implicitly firewalled via NAT). In an enterprise environment, dual stack support can get a lot more tricky and you need to ensure firewalls are property configured, or else regular workstations can be accessible via the public network.
Faaak 8y ago
Yes. Home connections have more IPv6 integration than businesses that have to configure their firewalls, etc.

vahno 8y ago

Heh. The only reason things are the way they are now is that the proponents of IPv6 were some cocky idiots who believed transition systems were not necessary because IPv6 was the best thing since sliced bread and IPv4 was going to implode anyway. Looks like they've been proven wrong. ISPs are happily using CG-NAT, all services are being adapted to that (moving away from p2p like Skype did) and end users don't care too much. Ouch!

pilif 8y ago
> ISPs are happily using CG-NAT I wonder how "happily" they are using CG-NAT. NAT is inherently stateful and keeping track of that state becomes more expensive as the amount of hosts behind the NAT is increasing. Running CG-NAT at scale is complicated and resource-intensive, so I'm totally willing to imagine that it's better long-term value for a carrier to switch to IPv6 than to expand CG-NAT.
- AstralStorm 8y ago
  You cannot for now just stop providing the CG-NAT, not when so much of the Internet is still v4 only. V6 deployment will reduce the load on it though.
- vahno 8y ago
  ISPs don't usually care too much about long-term value. When most of your core network is IPv4-only, getting some CG-NAT equipment is indeed cheaper than buying a completely new core network.
- londons_explore 8y ago
  The cost of maintaining the state tables used to be a concern in the ninties... Right now, my laptop has 4 open TCP sockets, and my phone has 3. Even assuming the average user has 50 sockets open, and assuming you are an ISP with 300 million users, that's still only 175 gigabytes of RAM. The total cost is under $1000, or peanuts for what would be the worlds largest ISP.
  - 8y ago

QUFB 8y ago

Google's own GCE still doesn't have IPv6 support on the instance level: https://googlecloudplatform.uservoice.com/forums/302595-compute-engine/suggestions/8518246-support-ipv6 https://googlecloudplatform.uservoice.com/forums/302595-comp...

pilif 8y ago
I'm a huge fan of IPv6 as it's a huge contributor to ensure the continued openness of the internet. Also, I'm in the privileged position of having a native dual-stack provided by my ISP, so I have native IPv4 and IPv6 both at home and in the office. And yet, even in this position, I think having IPv6 native inside of a production network isn't absolutely necessary (our production env runs in the RFC1918 space too even though v6 would be available at both ends): Access to the private production network should all happen over an encrypted and authenticated VPN and all access form the production network to the public network (if needed at all) should go through a filtering proxy server. Which means that the addressing used in your internal network becomes completely irrelevant and can easily be IPv4. This only becomes an issue once you need more hosts than the /8 offered by the 10/8 RFC1918 network, but the days when you need (and can afford) more than 16.7M nodes on a cloud computing provider are probably still a ways off. If you want instance level IPv6 in order to access an instance directly or in order to access a resource directly, you're probably doing something wrong. Then again, as services become v6 only (which will still be a few years off) and you need to access them from your production network, then your frontend proxy will of course need access to the v6 network. At that point, yes, instance level v6 becomes necessary too.
- lisper 8y ago
  > the days when you need (and can afford) more than 16.7M nodes on a cloud computing provider are probably still a ways off And the days when you need 16M nodes all of which need to talk to each other directly are probably even further off. (In fact, I would go even further and say that if you find yourself ever facing that situation you've done something badly wrong in your architectural design.)
- agwa 8y ago

platz 8y ago

As a web user, the ipv6 internet is basically Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia.. and freenode. that's pretty much it.

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ggm 8y ago
LinkedIn. Cloudflare. Akamai. Fastly. the CDNs can't enable webs who dont sign a consent. But.. you kinda need to look a bit harder.
- jgrahamc 8y ago
  Cloudflare enables IPv6 by default: https://blog.cloudflare.com/always-on-ipv6/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/always-on-ipv6/
  - ggm 8y ago
    Good point. +1 for CloudFlare

varshithr 8y ago

How is India so far ahead in IPv6 adoption?

AndrewDucker 8y ago
Because with IPV4 addresses getting ever more expensive[1] going straight to IPV6 for as much as possible, and placing everything else behind a provider-wide NAT saves you a lot of money. And in India they're trying to modernise as cheaply as possible. [1]https://www.ipv4auctions.com/ https://www.ipv4auctions.com/
- varshithr 8y ago
  Is it usually cellular ISP that first adopt IPv6? Because there's been a new disruptive player in telecom space called Jio and I am guessing they are behind this rise in IPv6 popularity.
  - bluGill 8y ago
    Yes, buying IPv4 address is expensive today. If you have been an ISP for years there is no problem because you bought your IPv4 addresses at yesterday's low prices. If you are a new ISP you pay today's high prices - but ipv6 is nearly free so you roll that out to save money.
  - tambre 8y ago
    Yes, but not always. In my country (Estonia) the biggest ISP (Telia) provides IPv6 for home connections, but not on the mobile network. As for Reliance Jio, they have over 300 million IPv6 users, with a total IPv6 adoption of 88% [0][1]. [0] http://www.worldipv6launch.org/now-we-are-six/ http://www.worldipv6launch.org/now-we-are-six/ [1] http://www.worldipv6launch.org/apps/ipv6week/measurement/images/graphs/RELIANCEJIOINFOCOMMLTD.pnghttp://www.worldipv6launch.org/apps/ipv6week/measurement/images/graphs/RELIANCEJIOINFOCOMMLTD.png http://www.worldipv6launch.org/apps/ipv6week/measurement/ima...
  - azernik 8y ago
    Even in the US, I believe the first large-scale IPv6 rollouts were by Verizon and Sprint.

okket 8y ago

dig +short aaaa news.ycombinator.com [no output]

djsumdog 8y ago
I use the SixOrNot browser extension to see which sites have IPv6 enabled (and to test the IPv6 on my own website). Yep, YC has been IPv4 for a good long while.
- tambre 8y ago
  There's also IPvFoo[0] for those on Chrome (it supports Firefox too, but is a bit buggier there). [0] https://github.com/pmarks-net/ipvfoo https://github.com/pmarks-net/ipvfoo
tambre 8y ago
They're working on it.

JustSomeNobody 8y ago

Why was there a barrier? I mean what was at the 25% mark that prevented surpassing it?

bluGill 8y ago
If you look at the graph, a year ago we were at 15%, so the it doesn't seem like there is a barrier, just growth finally hit that mark. There may well be a barrier in the future, but so far there isn't any sign of one.

Ambroos 8y ago

I wonder when a country is going to overtake Belgium in IPv6 adoption. Belgium has been slightly above 50% IPv6 traffic to Google for quite a while now, thanks to major ISPs switching to native dual-stack setups (and those ISPs being in full control of home networks in general). It seems that we in Belgium are somewhat stuck at this rate though. Consumer routers behind ISP modems that only provide IPv4, enterprises not adopting IPv6, mobile networks not adopting IPv6 (all IPv4 only with CGNAT if I'm not mistaken), ...

jgrahamc 8y ago
Based on Cloudflare traffic data we see this over the last 7 days: US 39.56% IN 39.03% BE 36.97% IE 36.23% MY 30.55% DE 28.24%
- Ambroos 8y ago
  Huh, interesting! I wonder where the discrepancy comes from.
  - chimeracoder 8y ago
    > Huh, interesting! I wonder where the discrepancy comes from. Probably because the Cloudflare data is percentage of traffic (e.g. total requests), and the Google data is percentage of users. Mobile traffic is more likely to be IPv6, and that would skew the numbers.
    - ecnahc515 8y ago
      Yeah, cloudflare sees a lot of backend systems too (servers); whereas Google probably gets more from (and is reporting on) devices attached to humans.
thaumasiotes 8y ago
https://blog.cloudflare.com/ipv6-in-china/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/ipv6-in-china/ There are some large countries out there. Note that according to my sibling comment, Belgium isn't #1, or above 50%, right now.

tomschlick 8y ago

Verizon FIOS seems to have given up any hope at implementing IPv6 :(

acct1771 8y ago
What makes you say that?
- tomschlick 8y ago
  It's been 7+ years since they said they were implementing it and I haven't seen any users post that they have IPv6 enabled on FIOS. Also customer support says they dont support it and dont know if/when they would be (I asked when I was ordering 4 months ago).
philg_jr 8y ago
Seriously...its a shame. Comcast's dual stack is impressive. I've been debating about moving back to Comcast just for this reason (in the rare part of the country where I actually have a choice of two decent providers). I've asked a few different CSR's to mention up the chain about losing a potential customer over this, but I doubt anyone cares, especially since I haven't talked to a CSR that actually knows what ipv6 is. I've "heard" the issue is due to Verizon's old peering agreements.
tambre 8y ago
They started rolling out IPv6 in a couple areas a few weeks ago [0]. [0] https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r32136440-Networking-IPv6-working https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r32136440-Networking-IPv6-w...
- tomschlick 8y ago
  Yeah I just stumbled upon that a few minutes ago. Hopefully it's the real deal this time.
- philg_jr 8y ago
  oh wow, thanks for this! I gave up hunting for info after a few years ;)

sigi45 8y ago

I got my ipv6 activated through a web forum from my isp (not even a small one) and writing one of the moderators a PM with my customer id :D That was 3 years ago =)

cptskippy 8y ago
Comcast has had IPv6 enabled for all supporting devices since at least 2012. * I've been running two IPv6 hosts without any issues since then.
- deathanatos 8y ago
  I'm also a Comcast customer, but I'm nearly certain I didn't get an IPv6 deployment until at least 2013/2014; I remember looking at their rather hidden signup form for beta testing IPv6 in ~2012, and I remember it being a rather long wait after that before it finally happened. (Some places definitely were seeing initial rollouts around that time, but it was a far cry from "all".)
  - cptskippy 8y ago
    I guess they officially started rolling it out in 2012. I'm in Atlanta and I noticed my modem's IP mode flip to "IPv6 Only" sometime in 2011. I've been hosting from two different machines since then and about 30% of my network traffic is IPv6.

brian_herman__ 8y ago

IPv6 goes up on the weekends according to this graph?

remus 8y ago
Total guess, but might be better adoption of IPv6 amongst consumer ISPs comapred to business ISPs?

gfiorav 8y ago

Late to the party but: Friendly reminder that IPv6 by default uses your mac address as part of your address and hence you are recognizable to any server in the world to track you around.

nerdponx 8y ago
I didn't know this. Is there an alternative?
- gfiorav 8y ago
  From another response: https://superuser.com/questions/243669/how-to-avoid-exposing-my-mac-address-when-using-ipv6 https://superuser.com/questions/243669/how-to-avoid-exposing...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
dddddaviddddd 8y ago
This is no longer the default on Mac and Windows at least: https://superuser.com/questions/243669/how-to-avoid-exposing-my-mac-address-when-using-ipv6 https://superuser.com/questions/243669/how-to-avoid-exposing...
- gfiorav 8y ago
  Nice! Thanks for the link. Been some time since my telco years!
philg_jr 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#SLAAC_privacy_extensions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#SLAAC_privacy_extensions
Symbiote 8y ago
Extremely late – this hasn't been the case since Mac OS 10.7 (2010) and Windows XP SP2 (2004).

exabrial 8y ago

Amazing how the companies that have the biggest interest in tracking users also are pushing ipv6 the hardest.

Oowee1Ee 8y ago
IPv6 does not really help with user tracking. IPv6 privacy extensions rotate the suffix your browser uses for outgoing connections on a daily basis. And it's enabled by default on most operating systems. It was somewhat broken for a while on windows 10, but they fixed that in march.
- chicob 8y ago
  But shouldn't the rotation take place connection-wise instead of on a daily basis? If a user browses with a given address and gets identified by one specific agent that shares that information with 3rd parties (e.g. a social network that collects and shares users' IP addresses), every time that happens the then generated new browsing data will have a solid past reference to which it will be added, thanks to that one correct identification.
- saana 8y ago
  Most ISPs have dynamic IPv4 addresses, but IPv6 removes that necessity. This WILL help tracking.
  - paulie_a 8y ago
    They might consider them dynamic but in 18 years the only time they ever changed was when I actually switched providers. They were essentially static IP addresses. With one ISP it was the same for 5-6 years.
    - saana 8y ago
      Depends on your ISP, no? I've been in a few and for most of them I would have a different IP just by rebooting my router.

alpb 8y ago

Why was 25% a barrier? Will it get higher adoption now that it has passed the "barrier"?

wongarsu 8y ago
It's an arbitrary number that looks nice and can be used to generate publicity for IPv6.
- tomschlick 8y ago
  Also, it can be used as a selling point to stakeholders. Much easier to advocate for when > 25% of traffic is using it than say 10%

PaulAJ 8y ago

Why the extra 5 percentage points every weekend?

tambre 8y ago
Because of people not working. IPv6 deployement on consumer internet providers is much higher than those of corporate environments. Lack of IPv6 on corporate networks isn't very surprising, considering how hard/annoying enabling it is for business connections [0]. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ipv6/comments/9jxp2c/isps_and_business_connections_rant/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ipv6/comments/9jxp2c/isps_and_busin...
MartianSquirrel 8y ago
I would believe it's because users are connecting in bigger proportions from their smartphones/home networks on weekends, compared to office networks during the week.

mrfusion 8y ago

Obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/865/ https://xkcd.com/865/

intopieces 8y ago

Are there any VPN services that don't have IP leaks for IPv6? I gave up and disabled it last time I investigated this issue.

TekMol 8y ago

My websites do not support IPv6. Is there any incentive for me to make them support it?

the8472 8y ago
CGNAT tables can become saturated, making new IPv4 connections flaky while v6 remains reliable. Thus you would improve user experience.
- TekMol 8y ago
  How would the user notice that? I don't have the feeling something is unreliable. Similar for HN. It also does not support IPv6. From my experience it is in the 99 percentile of websites when it comes to reliability. Aka it works pretty much all the time. Better then almost every other website.
  - the8472 8y ago
    That's your experience, which just means you don't run into saturated CGNATs. For those affected ipv6 sites provide fewer connection drops. > How would the user notice that? Initial connections taking multiple TCP syn retries leading to an initial stall or random assets from 3rd party sites or subdomains not being loaded which can break sites in many ways.

jimmaswell 8y ago

Parents' laptop recently had an inscrutable problem where only a handful of sites worked. Turned out to only be able to load ipv6 websites. On virtually every Google result while fixing the issue, the only way to see the contents was from Google's cache, so it seems like server side adoption is still pretty scarce.

ridgewell 8y ago
Did you find out what the issue was in the end? Was it because the IPv4 adapters were disabled? Server side adoption is honestly not that bad. Quite a few major datacenters implement IPv6, but people don't set their A records or slightly modify their config for an IPv6 interface. Cloudflare provides a temporary proxy solution in that it offers IPv6, but it isn't really true IPv6.
- jimmaswell 8y ago
  I believe it was the ipv4 adapters being disabled, or something else being disabled or set wrong in the adapter settings. No idea how it gets like that in the first place, but apparently it's a problem that's happened to other people often enough for there to be a few threads about it on various support forums.

Rexxar 8y ago

I would have expected an S-curve with an inflexion point at 50% but it seems to have already happened. We will probably have IPV4 for a long time.

derangedHorse 8y ago

It looks like the problem of unique digital addressing will only get harder as more and more people are introduced to the internet. I wonder what will come after IPv6...

pasbesoin 8y ago

I like NAT and the associated partial anonymity it can provide. (At least, you may have to hit up multiple organizations, maybe in different countries, to trace the endpoint(s).) I'm not looking forward to IPv6 enabling/escalating yet another factor in tracking everything and everyone, online. Maybe this is a grossly (as in, large) wrong and ill-informed perspective, on my part. If so, please disabuse me of it. I remain concerned.