6 ms·

For Google connecting clients it's only half the internet. Half. The. Internet. What a failure. /s

by knorker 10mo ago

alt227 10mo ago
This is mainly due to mobile devices only being issued ipv6 addresses by the telco 4g networks. They are the only ones using ipv6 on the millions of clients scale.
- School-Cotton 10mo ago
  My current home ISP and my last one both support IPv6 just fine. It is not a mobile-only thing.
  - alt227 10mo ago
    Everything supports both. We are talking about being issued only IPv6 addresses where you actually use it to connect to stuff. Most mobile devices are only issued an IPv6 address and therefore when the masses do google searches it uses IPv6 and makes it look like there is huge adoption.
    - School-Cotton 10mo ago
      > We are talking about being issued only IPv6 addresses where you actually use it to connect to stuff. You seem to be asserting that dual-stack machines use IPv4 by default, but that's not really true. If your machine has both IPv4 and IPv6 connectivity, browsers will in fact use IPv6 to connect to sites that support it, like Google. They prefer IPv6 by default and fall back to IPv4 if IPv6 is slower (Happy Eyeballs algorithm). Of course, random software can mostly use whichever it wants, so I'm not claiming every process on such a machine will use IPv6, but most common stuff does.
      - alt227 10mo ago
        In my use of Wireshark to check this, every device and software I have tested uses IPv4 by default expect mobile devices on 4g/5g networks. Not saying its like that everywhere, but Im not seeing IPv6 default usage on dual stack systems in my experience.
        School-Cotton 10mo ago
        Well, I am. MacBook on a home internet connection in Arizona. Using IPv6 by default without me having ever had to do anything special to configure it. You are simply misinformed. Either your setup doesn’t actually support IPv6 (or it’s much slower than IPv4 due to something being misconfigured), or you turned it off at some point, or you’re making a mistake in how you measure it. Because IPv6 is used by default on systems that support it. You don’t have to take my word for this, you can google it or ask someone else to try it.
        Dagger2 9mo ago
        Make sure they actually have GUA addresses, not just link-locals. If you're on a Linux machine, check `ip -c addr show` for an address that's "scope global" and doesn't start with "f". Those are the ones you need. If you have one of those, check `getent ahosts google.com` to see if v6 is being sorted before v4 in DNS lookups, and then `wget google.com` to see if wget prints any errors connecting to the v6 address. If you have GUA addresses and nothing is outright broken, devices and software that support v6 will prefer it over v6.
    - tialaramex 10mo ago
      Unsurprisingly Google actually does also have IPv4 addresses. What they're measuring isn't "How did you reach our servers?" but instead "Could you have reached our IPv6 servers?" So that measures everybody who has working IPv6. https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
      - dpark 10mo ago
        Where are you getting that claim from? Google’s page says “users that access Google over IPv6”. To me the specifically does not say, “could you” reach the servers but “did you”.
        tialaramex 10mo ago
        My understanding (for which I can't give you a citation) is that a tiny fraction of Google visitors are randomly chosen to try to reach IPv6 servers and measure what happens. Because of Happy Eyeballs if you measure whether your users did use IPv6 you don't find out whether they could have done so, and so your results will be thrown off by happenstance.
        Dagger2 10mo ago
        APNIC's stats check for that. For the US, it makes the difference between 58.74% capable and 57.85% preferring, so it doesn't produce a huge discrepancy.
        dpark 10mo ago
        I believe your understanding here is incorrect. It doesn’t make sense that Google would claim to measure usage while actually measuring access. I can’t find anything that supports your assertion.
    - kalleboo 10mo ago
      "When large masses of devices that use IPv6 connect to IPv6 servers it makes it look like there is huge IPv6 adoption" I don't understand your logic. How does a large amount of devices using IPv6 to connect to IPv6 servers only "make it look" like there is IPv6 adoption but somehow it shouldn't count?
- patmorgan23 10mo ago
  Comcast/Xfinity implemented v6 on their residential cable network 14 years ago ( https://corporate.comcast.com/comcast-voices/ipv6-deployment-technology https://corporate.comcast.com/comcast-voices/ipv6-deployment...) Most other large eyeball networks have as well.
  - School-Cotton 10mo ago
    He knows this. He’s bizarrely insisting that dual stack deployments don’t count as IPv6 usage, only single-stack IPv6-only ones do.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
commandersaki 10mo ago
It failed to solve the problem of impending IP address depletion and reliance. So at the very least, and being charitable, it is not a success.
- knorker 10mo ago
  > It failed to solve the problem of impending IP address depletion I wouldn't say so. Some mobile carriers and big data centers have used IPv6 to pretty much completely solve the problem of being able to assign a unique address to devices. For mobile devices, moving 50% of traffic over to IPv6 means buying half as many CGNAT/v6-to-v4 boxes (of various kinds). And on the v6-inside, unique address can be assigned. Legal requirement and court orders suck when you get "who had A.A.A.A:32800 at time T?" if you have to go through three levels of NAT to decode that. So even if a customer only accesses IPv4, having their actual handset only be assigned IPv6 makes things easier and cheaper. Even if they share an outside address, there's only one translation so the inside is unique. For big data companies, it means not needing to solve the problem of running out of 10/8 (yes I'm aware of the other private addresses), and having an address plan problem any time they make an acquisition. And I've seen large providers who build their whole actual network with IPv6, and only tunnel IPv4 on top of it. Huge savings in complexity and cost of IPv4 addresses. So what I'm saying is that I've seen first hand in multiple large providers of different kinds how IPv6 is delivering incremental payoff for incremental adoption. It doesn't have to be 100% before we get ROI. > it is not a success. About half of even public traffic on the most complex and distributed system ever built is IPv6. It's going slower than I'd like, but it's definitely paying off. There are still ATM and X.25 networks out there, so is IPv4 a failure? (admittedly, a bit hyperbolic) I'm working on a problem right now at a large company to move a thing from IPv4 to IPv6 because the existing IPv4 solution is running out of addresses, and it's impossible (for multiple reasons) to "just add more IPv4". Can't go into details, sorry.
  - commandersaki 10mo ago
    I should've qualified that as address exhaustion on the Internet, the side adventure of private networking has no bearing on the goal that IPng had set out to do, which was to address the impending address exhaustion. You say you wouldn't say so, but here we are, IPv4 exhausted, and IPv4 remains the incumbent. If IPv6 had succeeded, we would probably be having this very discussion on an IPv6 enabled site, the cost difference between a v4 address and a v6 address would be negligible, that is to say v6 would not be a second class citizen or an optional bolt-on to the Internet. I mean that's all that needs to be said about whether it has succeeded in what it needed to do.

For Google connecting clients it's only half the internet. Half. The. Internet. What a failure. /s

by knorker 10mo ago

For Google connecting clients it's only half the internet. Half. The. Internet. What a failure. /s

alt227 10mo ago

This is mainly due to mobile devices only being issued ipv6 addresses by the telco 4g networks. They are the only ones using ipv6 on the millions of clients scale.

School-Cotton 10mo ago
My current home ISP and my last one both support IPv6 just fine. It is not a mobile-only thing.
- alt227 10mo ago
  Everything supports both. We are talking about being issued only IPv6 addresses where you actually use it to connect to stuff. Most mobile devices are only issued an IPv6 address and therefore when the masses do google searches it uses IPv6 and makes it look like there is huge adoption.
  - School-Cotton 10mo ago
    > We are talking about being issued only IPv6 addresses where you actually use it to connect to stuff. You seem to be asserting that dual-stack machines use IPv4 by default, but that's not really true. If your machine has both IPv4 and IPv6 connectivity, browsers will in fact use IPv6 to connect to sites that support it, like Google. They prefer IPv6 by default and fall back to IPv4 if IPv6 is slower (Happy Eyeballs algorithm). Of course, random software can mostly use whichever it wants, so I'm not claiming every process on such a machine will use IPv6, but most common stuff does.
    - alt227 10mo ago
      In my use of Wireshark to check this, every device and software I have tested uses IPv4 by default expect mobile devices on 4g/5g networks. Not saying its like that everywhere, but Im not seeing IPv6 default usage on dual stack systems in my experience.
      - School-Cotton 10mo ago
        Well, I am. MacBook on a home internet connection in Arizona. Using IPv6 by default without me having ever had to do anything special to configure it. You are simply misinformed. Either your setup doesn’t actually support IPv6 (or it’s much slower than IPv4 due to something being misconfigured), or you turned it off at some point, or you’re making a mistake in how you measure it. Because IPv6 is used by default on systems that support it. You don’t have to take my word for this, you can google it or ask someone else to try it.
      - Dagger2 9mo ago
        Make sure they actually have GUA addresses, not just link-locals. If you're on a Linux machine, check `ip -c addr show` for an address that's "scope global" and doesn't start with "f". Those are the ones you need. If you have one of those, check `getent ahosts google.com` to see if v6 is being sorted before v4 in DNS lookups, and then `wget google.com` to see if wget prints any errors connecting to the v6 address. If you have GUA addresses and nothing is outright broken, devices and software that support v6 will prefer it over v6.
  - tialaramex 10mo ago
    Unsurprisingly Google actually does also have IPv4 addresses. What they're measuring isn't "How did you reach our servers?" but instead "Could you have reached our IPv6 servers?" So that measures everybody who has working IPv6. https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
    - dpark 10mo ago
      Where are you getting that claim from? Google’s page says “users that access Google over IPv6”. To me the specifically does not say, “could you” reach the servers but “did you”.
      - tialaramex 10mo ago
        My understanding (for which I can't give you a citation) is that a tiny fraction of Google visitors are randomly chosen to try to reach IPv6 servers and measure what happens. Because of Happy Eyeballs if you measure whether your users did use IPv6 you don't find out whether they could have done so, and so your results will be thrown off by happenstance.
        Dagger2 10mo ago
        APNIC's stats check for that. For the US, it makes the difference between 58.74% capable and 57.85% preferring, so it doesn't produce a huge discrepancy.
        dpark 10mo ago
        I believe your understanding here is incorrect. It doesn’t make sense that Google would claim to measure usage while actually measuring access. I can’t find anything that supports your assertion.
  - kalleboo 10mo ago
    "When large masses of devices that use IPv6 connect to IPv6 servers it makes it look like there is huge IPv6 adoption" I don't understand your logic. How does a large amount of devices using IPv6 to connect to IPv6 servers only "make it look" like there is IPv6 adoption but somehow it shouldn't count?
patmorgan23 10mo ago
Comcast/Xfinity implemented v6 on their residential cable network 14 years ago ( https://corporate.comcast.com/comcast-voices/ipv6-deployment-technology https://corporate.comcast.com/comcast-voices/ipv6-deployment...) Most other large eyeball networks have as well.
- School-Cotton 10mo ago
  He knows this. He’s bizarrely insisting that dual stack deployments don’t count as IPv6 usage, only single-stack IPv6-only ones do.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]

commandersaki 10mo ago

It failed to solve the problem of impending IP address depletion and reliance. So at the very least, and being charitable, it is not a success.

knorker 10mo ago
> It failed to solve the problem of impending IP address depletion I wouldn't say so. Some mobile carriers and big data centers have used IPv6 to pretty much completely solve the problem of being able to assign a unique address to devices. For mobile devices, moving 50% of traffic over to IPv6 means buying half as many CGNAT/v6-to-v4 boxes (of various kinds). And on the v6-inside, unique address can be assigned. Legal requirement and court orders suck when you get "who had A.A.A.A:32800 at time T?" if you have to go through three levels of NAT to decode that. So even if a customer only accesses IPv4, having their actual handset only be assigned IPv6 makes things easier and cheaper. Even if they share an outside address, there's only one translation so the inside is unique. For big data companies, it means not needing to solve the problem of running out of 10/8 (yes I'm aware of the other private addresses), and having an address plan problem any time they make an acquisition. And I've seen large providers who build their whole actual network with IPv6, and only tunnel IPv4 on top of it. Huge savings in complexity and cost of IPv4 addresses. So what I'm saying is that I've seen first hand in multiple large providers of different kinds how IPv6 is delivering incremental payoff for incremental adoption. It doesn't have to be 100% before we get ROI. > it is not a success. About half of even public traffic on the most complex and distributed system ever built is IPv6. It's going slower than I'd like, but it's definitely paying off. There are still ATM and X.25 networks out there, so is IPv4 a failure? (admittedly, a bit hyperbolic) I'm working on a problem right now at a large company to move a thing from IPv4 to IPv6 because the existing IPv4 solution is running out of addresses, and it's impossible (for multiple reasons) to "just add more IPv4". Can't go into details, sorry.
- commandersaki 10mo ago
  I should've qualified that as address exhaustion on the Internet, the side adventure of private networking has no bearing on the goal that IPng had set out to do, which was to address the impending address exhaustion. You say you wouldn't say so, but here we are, IPv4 exhausted, and IPv4 remains the incumbent. If IPv6 had succeeded, we would probably be having this very discussion on an IPv6 enabled site, the cost difference between a v4 address and a v6 address would be negligible, that is to say v6 would not be a second class citizen or an optional bolt-on to the Internet. I mean that's all that needs to be said about whether it has succeeded in what it needed to do.