Google Hits 50% IPv6

https://blog.apnic.net/2026/04/28/google-hits-50-ipv6/

by barqawiz • 1 month ago

428 478 1 month ago

blog.apnic.net

b1122• 1 month ago

And 32% is all llm/bots using AWS and other "pay for ipv4 IP" use cases.

benjojo12• 1 month ago

As someone on the fighting end of scrapers, this is absolutely not true. If anything I should bais towards v6 as the traffic is on par better than v4

Sesse__• 1 month ago

Just remove the A record, and nearly all the scrapers disappear. :-) (And then you get one email per month or so that “your host does not resolve in DNS”.)

b1122• 1 month ago

Google is having a real issue with LLMs using it for search. As in, real load issues. Unless you're running a publicly accessible search engine, and the top one at that, the LLM traffic you're seeing is not representative.

jcgl• 1 month ago

Citation needed. These numbers are quite consistent with the growth pattern that started well before usable LLMs were even a thing.

jeroenhd2• 1 month ago

Every scraper I have blocked seemed to use IPv4 primarily. Only when IPv4 gets blocked, some of them fall back to IPv6. Others just stay dead.

With AI companies using botnets ("residential proxies") for scraping, they're probably going to be in the 50% that doesn't use IPv6.

BadBadJellyBean17• 1 month ago

I wonder if there will ever come a day when IPv6 will provide a better web experience than IPv4.

At the moment pretty much every website is reachable via IPv4 but a lot not via IPv6. Will there be a day when this turns around?

mritzmann• 1 month ago

a better web experience than IPv4

That's already the case. IPv6 is often faster because most ISPs these days use cgnat for IPv4.

BadBadJellyBean17• 1 month ago

True but not deploying any IPv4 connectivity would be a worse experience than not deploying IPv6.

mort96• 1 month ago

That fraction of a millisecond doesn't meaningfully translate into a better experience for users.

jck864• 1 month ago

In my experience not true in practice cause I have experienced way more issues with the IPv6 endpoints of sites than their IPv4 counterparts.

This becomes noticeable when pipelines on IPv6 connected servers suddenly have random request/post failures to public services. Then either the whole service is temporarily having issues or there are a few bad IPv6 endpoints while all the IPv4 endpoints are fine.

Seemingly this failure mode can go unnoticed for days while the same won't be true for IPv4 due IPv4-only still being the norm for corporate networks. And no, current form of happy eyeballs v2 won't account for this.

Besides bad endpoints it could also be a problem with bgp route advertisements where the IPv6 prefix takes a weird path and ends up being blocked by a CDN at the other side of the ocean. This happens more than you'd think. Obtaining pypi packages was quite a challenge last year for us for a couple of weeks due to this.

Not really a fault of IPv6 technology wise, and in general can be solved client side through retry functionality, but in practice it still can lead to a worse outcome due to lackluster IPv6 adoption.

I used to think ISPs, organisations, admins and users were just being lazy for not implementing IPv6 or turning it off as the first thing to do when network problems happen, but when this far in the rollout such basic things still lead to difficult troubleshooting sessions then perhaps time has come to say something has gone terribly wrong.

It saddens me to say that I totally understand that businesses do not want to pay the price for implementing IPv6 unless absolutely necessary, because until the majority of traffic is IPv6 or even IPv6-only it does not make a lot of sense.

The flipping point is nearer than ever, though I fear it will in the short term lead to even worse stability for both protocols until IPv6 truly becomes the norm, whenever that may be.

VorpalWay2• 1 month ago

I have yet to see any ISP use CGNAT here in Sweden. It seems to be a highly regional problem for some reason. Both on mobile and on broadband I get publicly routable IPv4.

hdgvhicv14• 1 month ago

That depends on your isp. Mine certainly doesn’t, and I’ve never had an isp on the U.K. which didn’t give me at least a dynamic ipv4 address to my router.

Infact the only isp I have seen do it is starlink and I have contacts with ISPs in 60 different counties.

commandersaki10• 1 month ago

Sparing a few hundred microseconds of latency is tangibly a better experience?

CrLf4• 1 month ago

When CGNAT is present, my guess is that's the case. It would be nice to see a study on that; don't know if there is one already.

Users doing speed tests in CGNAT may be seeing numbers that aren't exactly real for a (still) mostly IPv4 Internet.

AndyMcConachie• 1 month ago

I would expect online video games to be a more important driver.

inigyou42• 1 month ago

and anything P2P. Maybe that would have been a driver 20 years ago, but now everything is expected to be centralised. Our culture has shifted. Remember when people used to host their game servers? If you're under 16, you don't because it was never in your lifetime.

telesilla• 1 month ago

Faster webrtc establishments and other negotiated connections. CGNAT means more relayed than P2P connections so it should be possible to have more direct traffic for services that want to save that bandwidth.

vbernat2• 1 month ago

It already does. With IPv6, you don't go through some CGNAT box, that could misbehave or just break (and since the biggest chunk of content is available through IPv6, this may not be a priority). Also, a shared IPv4 can be banned by various sites if one of the owner misbehaves. This issue is not present with IPv6.

More on this: https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2024-why-ipv6

PacificSpecific3• 1 month ago

First thing I do on a fresh Linux install is set ipv6 to deactivated. Fixes all my initial Linux install problems. I don't question it, it just works every time.

BadBadJellyBean17• 1 month ago

Something is very wrong with your network then. I never needed to disable IPv6. Maybe you should question it.

PacificSpecific3• 1 month ago

Fair enough. I do question it often.

It's a standard Asus router but it's given me a lot of ire. I hate to say it but it's never a problem when I install windows on the same machines

(I'm currently in the process of trying to completely remove windows from my life)

ash2• 1 month ago

It is harder to maintain two networks instead of one. Potential problems double. Hacks like RFC8305 "Happy Eyeballs" become a must.

inigyou42• 1 month ago

If your ipv6 internet is broken you should probably turn it off on your router - hosts on the LAN can still communicate using ipv6 link-local, as some apps will want to do.

Cider9986• 1 month ago

How does IPV6 affect ip blocking. As a VPN user I wish it wasn't used as a metric for sites shaking you down.

BadBadJellyBean17• 1 month ago

I assume for aggressive blocking the only prefix size will change. What is a /32 for IPv4 might become a /64 or smaller for IPv6.

hdgvhicv14• 1 month ago

Larger. A /56 and get multiple hits from nearby /56s and you block the /48.

mahboi25• 1 month ago

Shouldn't blocking v6 also be based on /32 if you want the attacker's cost to be the same?

lxgr7• 1 month ago

It's just as easy or hard to map out a VPN's egress subnets on v6 than it is on v4.

MYEUHD• 1 month ago

Thread from two months ago (626 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777894

dang• 1 month ago

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777894 - April 2026 (621 comments)

---

Other recent threads, if anyone would like a thousand more IPv6 comments:

The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47821429 - April 2026 (166 comments)

IPv6 is the only way forward - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47680124 - April 2026 (339 comments)

IPv6 Adoption in 2026 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47083086 - Feb 2026 (21 comments)

IPv6 is not insecure because it lacks a NAT - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46696303 - Jan 2026 (577 comments)

coldstartops• 1 month ago

Google hits 50% IPv6, very good for accessing websites.

But my TP-Link router blocks by default inbound IPv6 connections, without any option to configure it, still bad for pure IPv6 bidirectional streaming, gaming or services on home networks.

jmyeet• 1 month ago

All these systems are a reflection of the time that they were designed. IPv6 is 30 years old. At that time a lot of threats just didn't exist. One of my favorite is the decision to default to /64 blocks. There was a time when the designers believed that you'd use your 48 bit MAC address as part of this. Now we know that's a PII nightmare and nobody does it. Yet we're still stuck with the 128 bit addresses that came from that.

To your point, IPv6 sought to replace NAT with just having enough addresses but interestingly, that created a problem. If you used NAT and had a service on your computer request a port for incoming connections, that showed intent on behalf of the owner of that service. IPv6 doesn't have that intent, which forces home router makers do block addresses by default because you don't want most PCs on the Internet such that an external agent can scan your PC. You may end up with an unintended service on the open Internet.

So is the bigger address range better? Technically, maybe? But you have to consider defaults and intents of users. And that can take a good technical solution to a bad solution or at least create a whole bunch of problems.

BadBadJellyBean17• 1 month ago

I don't think this is inherently a problem. It's good for home routers to have sensible defaults. Blocking incoming IPv6 connections is such a thing. Opening a port in the firewall shows the same kind of intent as forwarding a port with NAT. The burden is on the router manufacturers to expose these options in a sensible way. My router for example has a similar UI to forwarding a port with IPv4 and opening the port for IPv6.

Using NAT as a firewall might work but it brings it's own problems. I find the IPv6 way better.

fc417fc8024• 1 month ago

Now we know that's a PII nightmare and nobody does it. Yet we're still stuck with the 128 bit addresses that came from that.

Randomizing the local address doesn't mean it isn't useful. You can't scan a /64 so that's already a major improvement. The fact that randomly selecting a number is effectively never going to collide greatly simplifies automatic network configuration.

The major issue is that the /64 isn't mandatory from a technical perspective. Being merely a subset of the larger address it's nothing more than a convention. In the end not all providers make it available to you even though supposedly they ought to.

If we're going to complain about anything it should be the godawful notation that so easily breaks parsers. Or the fact that the width is massively excessive which creates a usability nightmare due to normal humans not being able to readily recall 128 bit numbers (let alone how long it takes to type them in).

gucci-on-fleek9• 1 month ago

There was a time when the designers believed that you'd use your 48 bit MAC address as part of this. Now we know that's a PII nightmare and nobody does it.

Nobody includes their MAC address in their public IPv6 addresses anymore, but every IPv6 setup that I've seen still gives every device a unique globally-routable IPv6 address, with no NAT at all.

One of my favorite is the decision to default to /64 blocks.

The nice thing is that a /64 is big enough that clients can just randomly pick any address, and it will almost certainly be available, meaning that you don't need DHCP. This is actually widely implemented, and is known as SLAAC [0].

Yet we're still stuck with the 128 bit addresses that came from that.

The extra address space only adds 16 bytes to every packet, and it ensures that we will never run out of addresses like we did with IPv4.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#Stateless_address_autocon...

lxgr7• 1 month ago

The point of local networks of a minimum size of 64 bit isn't only to have MAC-based addresses (48 bit would have been enough for that, fwiw), but in general to support non-coordinated/probabilistic self-assignment schemes with negligible collision probability.

Picking a random local address (which is very important for privacy, as you've mentioned) is much easier if you don't have to do an elaborate dance of listen, announce, listen for collisions etc. first (practically that still happens, but collisions are the absolute exception).

So is the bigger address range better?

Yes, because consider the alternative of re-doing all of this again in a future in which IP usage for some reason jumps by a few orders of magnitude again.

Due to hardware getting better over time, the per-packet cost of a few extra bits is going down all the time, while the cost of rolling out a future IPv7 increases with every new deployed host.

throw0101a25• 1 month ago

IPv6 doesn't have that intent, which forces home router makers do block addresses by default because you don't want most PCs on the Internet such that an external agent can scan your PC. You may end up with an unintended service on the open Internet.

Every residential router already has PCP (RFC 6887) and UPnP IGD to deal with the NAT44 non-sense that is the status quo, and both protocols support IPv6 hole punching, so IPv6 default deny as a policy is hardly an issue in the residential space.

MiniUPnPd, which many Linux-based CPEs use, has supported IGDv2 (needed for IPv6) since 2012 (as well as PCP).

Leonard_of_Q2• 1 month ago

Put OpenWRT on the thing and you'll be able to do what you want. Experience the joy of adding not port forwarding rules for IPv4 but more or less identical (same ports) access rules for IPv6.

ddtaylor• 1 month ago

Not that it really matters because almost all the consumer roiter manufacturers are pretty bad, but TP-Link is really, really bad. I would highly recommend not using any of their hardware.

p1mrx• 1 month ago

TP-Link hardware is decent, if you buy one with OpenWrt support.

newsoftheday2• 1 month ago

But my TP-Link router blocks by default inbound IPv6 connections

I selfhost web and email over my Wireguard VPN using a free VPS (at OCI but I did it with AWS Lightsail too, though it wasn't free but cheap). This can work for you too or you can use easier to configure solutions like Tailscale. This way, your home isn't exposed directly to the Internet.

mahboi25• 1 month ago

Most people will never touch their router config, so the defaults are important. Default-deny inbound is better than allow. But it's surprisingly dumb that the router won't even let you configure it to allow, you sure there's no option to disable the firewall?

skywhopper• 1 month ago

I’ve yet to live anywhere where the available mainstream ISPs were willing or able to provide IPv6 service. I’d be happy to use it, if I were able.

I also have built cloud infrastructure for multiple SaaS providers with tens of thousands of customers over the past decade. Only one customer I’m aware of has ever even requested IPv6 support. And if customers aren’t asking for it, my employers have never been interested in the full network re-architecture required to truly support it internally.

There are still several basic services you can’t run IPv6-only in AWS, and a handful of AWS service features that don’t support it at all.

As a sysadmin for decades now, I’ve always found IPv6 to be overengineered and in many ways completely ridiculous. But I’d love to be supporting it in everything I do. Only I still can’t, even after 20+ years of being lectured about it; even after complete IPv4 exhaustion has been reached. I don’t think we’re ever going to turn IPv4 off. At best it will be progressively hidden, even from technical users. And folks like me will just have to keep building workarounds to patch the holes where IPv6 still doesn’t work.

BadBadJellyBean17• 1 month ago

I'm interested, apart from the chicken egg problem, what are things that you found bad about IPv6. What do you think is overengineered?

I personally found that the features I interacted with were useful (SLAAC, address size, router advertisements, ...) and the changes made it cleaner (removal of broadcast for multicast, removal of fragmentation fields, ...).

tormeh4• 1 month ago

apart from the chicken egg problem

"But other than that, Ms. Lincoln, how was the play?"

gucci-on-fleek9• 1 month ago

I’ve always found IPv6 to be overengineered and in many ways completely ridiculous.

Most software continues to have horrible IPv6 support and documentation making it look more complicated, but the actual protocol is considerably simpler than IPv4. For example:

1. An IPv4 packet header is variable-length, and the checksum must be recalculated by every router because the TTL is included in the checksum. Whereas an IPv6 packet header is fixed-length and has no checksum.

2. NAT is effectively required with IPv4, but it makes everything much more complicated, since it means that most computers don't even know their "real" IP address, it makes peer-to-peer networking very challenging, and it's tricky for routers to implement. Whereas with IPv6, no NAT is required.

3. Any router along the network path is allowed to fragment an IPv4 packet, and is in fact required to if its MTU is smaller than the packet's size. Whereas only the originating node is allowed to fragment an IPv6 packet.

4. To acquire an IPv4 address, both clients and routers must implement DHCP, which is a fairly complicated protocol, and both clients and routers must remember the list of assigned addresses. Whereas with IPv6, the client can just choose a random address (via SLAAC) and then start using it immediately.

5. IPv6 multicast is considerably simpler than IPv4 multicast, and NDP (v6) is considerably simpler than ARP (v4).

Despite all this, I agree with you that setting up IPv6 networking is harder than setting up IPv4 networking, but this is more of a software problem than a protocol problem.

inigyou42• 1 month ago

The only one I don't understand is how NDP is simpler than ARP. ARP is an Ethernet broadcast while NDP is built on IPv6 multicast which creates a recursive chicken and egg situation.

hdgvhicv14• 1 month ago

2 is a security nightmare but that’s why firewalls prevent it by default

3 well you can set the dont fragment bit at a client side or a router can drop the packet. These are choices. If a 1500 byte IPv6 packet arrives on a router with an 1100 byte next hop, does it just drop? Or send back a fragmentation needed icmp? How is that different from setting a “don’t fragment” option on a router.

4 isn’t created from a security or management point of view either. And v4 has the 169.254 range for this purpose. I guess the lack of router advertisement is the primary difference. And the operational expectations.

5a I’m not sure about. My main experience with multicast is pim-sm on v4. SSM v4 multicast however seems simple, and while I don’t use it as I have kit that’s too old for it is v6 really easier than v4/ssm/igmp3?

As for arp, I don’t see any real complexity with it as a network operator, but maybe that’s because I’m used to it. Perhaps it’s easier to implement nd rather than arp, but given almost every v6 deployment for the last 30 years is dual stack all it does is increase complexity.

commandersaki10• 1 month ago

Considerably simpler? There's two ways (maybe more?) to autoconfigure v6 addresses on a host, I'll never know or remember which to use. In v4 there's DHCP, that's all you need to know (nobody uses BOOTP). These endless choices go on and on with v6 with umpteen transition technologies to work with v4.

ivlad3• 1 month ago

NDP is not simpler than ARP. For one, NDP relies on link-local addresses to work which in turn relies on MAC multicast where ARP relies on MAC broadcast only.

inigyou42• 1 month ago

Did you call your ISP and ask? Some of them support it but won't enable it by default.

ThePhysicist• 1 month ago

Noooo, my /22 IPv4 subnet allocation is my personal 401k, I need this money to retire.

mimsee• 1 month ago

Time to cash in?

scandox• 1 month ago

About 2023 I think

hdgvhicv14• 1 month ago

Prices have been coming down for years in nominal terms, let alone real terms. Cg nat does everything that’s needed, there are no significant ip6 only services, there are plenty of ip4 only services, so you have to support ip4 anyway, so why bother with ip6

My company has just turned off all ip6 connectivity for its corporate laptops because it’s considered a security risk. I disagree, but I do agree that having 4 and 6 is a higher risk than 4 alone or 6 alone, and 6 alone sadly still doesn’t work reliably.

All the “promise” of ip6, direct connections etc, were lost when stateful firewalls became required and memory became cheaper than $20 a megabyte. Some bespoke old protocols don’t like ports changing, which can be a problem, but it’s a very small number and easier to work around with modern protocols than support a dual stack environment securely for the majority of places that struggle securing a single stack.

jampekka2• 1 month ago

You'll be really screwed in around the year 2100!

stymaar• 1 month ago

You joke, but its exactly how society thinks about housing…

heresie-dabord2• 1 month ago

Be a good neighbour, the AI data centres need to live somewhere.

chung8123• 1 month ago

It is difficult to retire with house equity. Housing is just one element of what you need to have in retirement and after a certain point, and especially in retirement, once the house is what you plan to stay in forever it is better if it is worth less (all other social factors aside) so that you don't pay as much in taxes on it.

rvba3• 1 month ago

Great example of how fixing things "the correct way" does not seem to work sometimes.

They added those new addresses that can store more information.. but this requires a rewrite of old software to make it work.

If they used the old >bolting on top< method by extending ip4 from 4 octets to 8 (or more) octets, then old software could be extended much easier too / probably addresses could be simply mechanically translated too, so ancient software can work.

noduerme• 1 month ago

I never heard this idea before, but more octets would be a lot prettier!!

BadBadJellyBean17• 1 month ago

They added 12 more octets. I mean we could have written IPv6 addresses in the old format but I don't think that

42.0.20.80.64.1.192.15.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.113

is easier to remember than

2a00:1450:4001:c0f::71 (or 2a00:1450:4001:0c0f:0000:0000:0000:0071)

Hendrikto5• 1 month ago

You have not heard if before, because that is the most naive and stupid take imaginable. It is the “let them eat cake” of networking.

It does not work like that. Put extra octets where exactly? Where would a hardware router put the extra bytes? Where would software with 32 bit buffers?

You would still need to replace all of the software and hardware and have the exact same problem.

inigyou42• 1 month ago

Are you just talking about how you write the addresses or are you talking about the actual protocol?

The IPv4 protocol has 4 octets each for source and destination address. Period. If you change that, your packets won't work on any IPv4 routers or software any more.

If you want to write IPv6 addresses as numbers separated by dots no one's stopping you but I don't see how it's better. They switched to hex because the old format was too long.

johannes1234321• 1 month ago

Software availability isn't really the problem. For most software there was no change at all ("connect to that host" or "listen to any device" and operating system will handle details), most software which needed adaption had it for a while (picking up a devices explicitly, handling of IPv6 addressees, ...) while maybe not equally good (missing GUI improvements for better handling of IPV6 addresses)

The problems, as I observe, are more in network infrastructure, routing, etc.

BadBadJellyBean17• 1 month ago

There is no space to put the additional octets. Supporting this would have needed a rewrite anyways. Nothing won there. They took that as a chance to improve the protocol overall.

inigyou42• 1 month ago

Actually no software rewrite is needed because the Berkeley Sockets API is agnostic to address format. If your software requires a particular address format, that's a bug. if you pass an IPv6 literal to getaddrinfo, you get a result with an IPv6 address structure and it tells you the IPv6 socket type you need to connect to it.

mkj2• 1 month ago

getaddrinfo was added after ipv6. Software had to be rewritten to use getaddrinfo.

Prior to that programs used gethostbyname() etc, which only works with ipv4.

throw0101a25• 1 month ago

If they used the old >bolting on top< method by extending ip4 from 4 octets to 8 (or more) octets, then old software could be extended much easier too / probably addresses could be simply mechanically translated too, so ancient software can work.

In every fucking IPv6 thread this "just add more addresses" idea comes up. There is no "just" in expanding the address space:

"""

Whether you expand the address size to 33, 64 or 128 bits, all IPv4 implementations will discard the packets. So it's a matter of mathematical and physical fact that to expand the address size, you must change the protocol, and that means two things immediately:

1. You have to change the version number.

2. You have to add new code to handle the new version.

Furthermore, you don't want to split the Internet in two, so you must design a method of interworking between the old version and the new version. Annoyingly, you need to do that in a way that can be done completely in machines that know about the new version, because other machines don't know anything at all about the new version, by definition. So,

3. You need a coexistence technique so that updated systems, with the new protocol, can connect to old systems that know nothing of the new protocol.

Two minutes of thought show that this third requirement has only two solutions:

(3A) Dual stack, in which the new machines speak both the old (IPv4) and new (IPng) protocol.

(3B) Translation, in which something translates addresses between the old and new protocols.

This has been known for more than 30 years [RFC1671], although people still sometimes try to deny it.

"""

* https://github.com/becarpenter/book6/blob/main/01.%20Introdu...

Any IPv4+ idea that "just" adds more address bits will same issues we've faced with IPv6.

CableNinja• 1 month ago

The issue the GP is making is that rather than devising a whole new protocol altogether, including resolution and assignments, other things like that, adoption likely would have been much faster and wider.

Had the original plan been simply "extend address space" instead of "extend address space and while we are at it revamp and rewrite every part of the whole scheme including assignment, discovery, and everything else we see wrong with ipv4"; we would be in a much better place.

Adding extra address bytes would of course require new changes across the internet, but that change would be easier to swallow compared to having to rip and replace large swaths of processes to make ipv6 work because of all of the other changes that came with ipv6.

Also, the stupid idea of turning addresses to hex as the default, and more specifically the dumb :: shortening methods really made it confusing for everyone and didnt help at all in the efforts.

mahboi25• 1 month ago

Yes, we want ipv5 that just does 1, 2, 3 instead of ipv6 which does the most complicated variants of those and more. We didn't have requirements 4. change all the pre-existing addresses 5. make addresses randomly assigned 6. make routers accept inbound connections by default 7. give every device its own public IP by default. Ipv6 did those anyway.

Like I own 8.8.8.8. You want to add more bits, fine, I'm 8.8.8.8.0.0.0.0 now. If anyone switches to the new thing, they know where to find me.

tolien5• 1 month ago

If anything demonstrates the Dunning-Kruger effect on this forum, it’s the “just add more bits” crowd.

spockz• 1 month ago

Meanwhile T-Mobile/Odido in the Netherlands is still not supporting IPv6 despite promising to have been working on it for years.

Ubiquity gateways also seem to not support it sadly. It would be awesome if they supported something like Hurricane Electric’s tunneling.

kuschku• 1 month ago

Huh? Ubiquity has dropped support? I can't believe that, even the older EdgeRouter series supported it.

mkj2• 1 month ago

Old Nanostations as a client need to do proxy arp or something, which doesn't handle ipv6. That said it's probably 15 year old hardware. I ended up using a wireguard tunnel across it instead.

mtucker502• 1 month ago

They support it. I have it enabled with Spectrum. No file modification necessary; all configurable from the UI.

jon-wood3• 1 month ago

  $ curl -v https://news.ycombinator.com
  * Host news.ycombinator.com:443 was resolved.
  * IPv6: 2606:7100:1:67::26
  * IPv4: 209.216.230.207
  *   Trying [2606:7100:1:67::26]:443...
  * ALPN: curl offers h2,http/1.1
  * TLSv1.3 (OUT), TLS handshake, Client hello (1):

Works fine through a Ubiquiti gateway here.

kay_o• 1 month ago

It is entertaining that the situation becomes opposite in T-Mobile on States does not support IPv4 and only assigns IPv6 with 464xlat for "Fake-NAT" to IPv4.

newsclues• 1 month ago

https://help.ui.com/hc/en-us/articles/36378535649687-Configu...

cge• 1 month ago

It would be awesome if they supported something like Hurricane Electric’s tunneling.

HE tunnel IP space is now sufficiently penalized as non-residential/office that I’ve had to turn it off anyway. YouTube, for example, largely seems to block users in HE space unless they are logged in, and I frequently ran into neverending captchas.

inigyou42• 1 month ago

Every ISP has to pay Hurricane Electric for their tunnels, that's why it's free to you. If enough people start using HE tunnels, ISPs will get native IPv6.

But you can't use HE tunnels because every website you visit will block you. You also can't use them from CGNAT or if your home router doesn't have a DMZ.

stingraycharles2• 1 month ago

And wouldn’t it add a considerable latency?

gruez5• 1 month ago

Every ISP has to pay Hurricane Electric for their tunnels, that's why it's free to you.

Is there a law mandating this?

throw0101a25• 1 month ago

Meanwhile T-Mobile/Odido in the Netherlands is still not supporting IPv6 despite promising to have been working on it for years.

While T-Mobile US has been IPv6-only since ~2018:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6oBCYHzrTA

jdw643• 1 month ago

I made my homepage (www.makonea.com) support IPv6 too, but the number of people actually using it is much smaller than I expected. Is IPv6 really that widely used? I'm supporting both because I heard it's good to support both, but I'm not sure what the actual benefit is. Sometimes, when behind Cloudflare, I think even if someone connects via IPv6, it ends up coming through as IPv4

BadBadJellyBean17• 1 month ago

It's good to support it to resolve the chicken egg problem. If no service supports it, there is no sense in deploying it to the customers and the other way around.

Also you made the life better of people who have DS lite. They only get a public IPv6 and all their IPv4 traffic goes through a CGNAT.

reddalo• 1 month ago

For people like me: DS Lite stands for "IPv6 dual-stack lite". My mind went directly to Nintendo and I was confused.

fc417fc8024• 1 month ago

For client server web browsing what's the downside of CGNAT? I'd understand if we were talking about self hosting a service from home but for typical consumer usage?

ash2• 1 month ago

Unfortunately, individual actions would never be enough to solve the IPv6 chicken and egg problem. See djb's "IPv6 mess" article:

https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html

Yes, it is old, many examples are outdated, but the main points still hold. Decades later his suggestions for making IPv6 succeed are still not implemented.

Hendrikto5• 1 month ago

Is IPv6 really that widely used?

Mobile carriers use it almost exclusively, which is already a huge chunk of the internet, and newer ISPs are switching to it too.

I'm supporting both because I heard it's good to support both, but I'm not sure what the actual benefit is.

The benefit is that you allow IPv4-only and IPv6-only clients to connect.

tormeh4• 1 month ago

I accidentally became the user of an IPv6-only device a while back for some obscure reason I never could figure out. Let me tell you: There are no IPv6-only users. Absolutely nothing except Google, Facebook, and YouTube works. Any website not in the top 20 are IPv4-only. It was so bad I briefly thought I didn't have an internet connection at all. Anyone stuck on an IPv6-only connection would immediately cancel their contract on the grounds that they don't have de-facto internet access.

jon-wood3• 1 month ago

When hosting a server IPv6 doesn't make a huge difference beyond your logs will probably be a bit more accurate, people behind CGNAT where an ISP has multiple customers sharing a block of IPv4 will show up with their actual IPv6 address. They'll maybe also find it slightly quicker because they're not being funnelled through NAT gateways but realistically not enough to notice.

From the user side IPv6 is great for me. My ISP is using CGNAT and would bill me ten pounds a month for a static IPv4 address but I automatically get a vast block of IPv6. I'm using that block to allow me to VPN back home when out and about, and if I wanted to I could also host services from devices on my home network without needing any NAT nonsense, I can just open access to the relevant device on the router. (Because this is a world where not everywhere supports IPv6 yet if I'm on an IPv4 only network the VPN endpoint is a dedicated server I rent which forwards the relevant port back to my home router over IPv6)

jdw643• 1 month ago

Thank you for the advice. By any chance, have you worked with Ruby before? I remember seeing your username back when Ruby was popular and I first started learning it in university

hdgvhicv14• 1 month ago

So your isp is rinsing you for the cost of a an IPv4 address. £10 a month will pay for a whole /24 in 3 years.

Chances are they also skimping on other areas including over subscription. Choose a better isp if you want a better service.

Your “just open traffic to internal host 1 on your firewall is the same no matter if it has nat or not, unless you are using a non stateful firewall? Or perhaps your configuration layer splits the two for reasons.

inigyou42• 1 month ago

A lot of internet spambots and vulnerability scanners are v4 only. I discovered this when I found an open mail relay on v6, contacted the owner and he said it's been like that for ages due to a config mistake and he'd never heard a complaint. It wasn't an open relay on v4.

newsoftheday2• 1 month ago

My selfhosted email has been dual stack for close to a year and my eyeball estimate of the logs is around 10% of the traffic is IPv6.

nottorp• 1 month ago

I recently enabled ipv6 on an unadvertised server i use just with people i know... it's on my home connection actually.

The great news is those vulnerability scans from random IPs are coming just on ipv4, there hasn't been any yet on ipv6 :)

tumetab1• 1 month ago

Likely caused by better performance provided by IPv4.

Browsers try both stacks (Happy Eyeballs algorithm) so likely the IPv4 is working better for your visitors.

Since must people use IPv4 most of the time, IPv6 performance issues go unnoticed by the users, ISPs, CDNs, etc.

xyst• 1 month ago

Took them long enough. Now if only Google would follow with their own services.

Sure Gmail has ipv6 enabled and routable ip6 MX. but sending to those addresses is often rejected and forced to retry over ipv4.

Don’t get me started on gh

mmwelt• 1 month ago

Interesting to see the per-country rates[1]. France is up to 85%, apparently!

[1] https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...

Leonard_of_Q2• 1 month ago

The more mobile traffic, the more IPv6. Have a look at India, it is not as if everyone has a fibre connection running IPv6.

lloeki2• 1 month ago

Well, France has 99% IPv6 deployment through both mobile and landline these days

https://www.arcep.fr/fileadmin/reprise/observatoire/ipv6/Arc...

(2025, from 2024 data)

Reason that Google isn't seeing more is a) some BigCo v4 holdouts b) happy eyeballs sometimes landing on v4 because their v6 is shitty 6rd or something (e.g Free SAS)

anunay03• 1 month ago

I'd however mention, the two biggest ISPs that remain today both have adopted IPv6 on their fiber connections. They're also heavily using CGNAT for IPv4. It makes sense, the volume at which they're working makes dedicated IPv4 very uneconomical.

jeroenhd2• 1 month ago

My home internet has IPv6 but my mobile carrier doesn't. IPv6 on mobile carriers is unfortunately still not universal.

CorrectHorseBat• 1 month ago

Here in Belgium it's the other way around. we've had IPv6 for over 10 years for basically all home internet, but mobile is still ipv4 only. Not sure why since it's all the same companies.

stcg• 1 month ago

Anyone know why there is a high frequency signal on top of the long term trend in that graph?

https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...

lemagedurage• 1 month ago

People connect through cellphones more on weekends, and cellular has higher IPv6 usage.

AndrewDucker• 1 month ago

People connect from home more at the weekends and home ISPs support ipv6 more than offices do.

whatever13• 1 month ago

The great news is that India is at 75%, otherwise the price pressure for ipv4 addresses would be insane

shevy-java• 1 month ago

I want Google gone. This company is causing too many problems.

I am still sometimes using Google Search. First results are now almost always videos on youtube, aka self-promo. These videos are in 99.9% of the search results I use, totally useless and worthless. Even searching on youtube has recently gotten worse. It is also crap now. I know that because I bookmark various videos, and I can not find older videos anymore either. I can eliminate some results I don't care via ublock origin hero-blocking this Google garbage, but I really think we should no longer allow this de-facto monopoly to worsen the global situation any longer. The USA is protecting these gangsters - it is time to have true legislation that gets rid of that mafia bloc that is Google.

CrLf4• 1 month ago

Cloudflare sees over 40%, and it hasn't gone up in the last year even with the overall traffic increase. Personally, as the APNIC article also says about their own observations, I guess the overall adoption is somewhere in between.

https://radar.cloudflare.com/adoption-and-usage#ipv4-vs-ipv6

But we have to remember that this reflects the adoption on the client side. With many high profile services still IPv4-only, the fraction of IPv6 flowing on the public Internet might be much lower.

I wonder what incentives are needed to push this forward, because it's not the same incentives as years ago for sure. We've long since exhausted new IPv4 allocations.

kalleboo4• 1 month ago

If we're looking at the portion of traffic, most of the big bandwidth heavy services (the video streaming sites and CDNs) are on IPv6, the long tail of IPv4-only services tend to be lower bandwidth stuff.

Fabricio20• 1 month ago

I believe one big anti-incentive is rate limiting, especially nowadays. With IPv4 getting a range ban is somewhat effective, way less effective on ipv6 (theres a reason HE tunnelbroker is marked bad nowadays, discord bots doing music load balance over ips on tunnelbroker for pulling youtube audio data.. they ban a /64 but you balance over a /48 or bigger). I believe this was the main reason Discord disabled IPv6 (not sure if thats still the case, but it was back in the day since bans and api rate limiting was ip based).

Dagger225• 1 month ago

Why is it less effective on v6? You just ban the /48 or bigger.

charcircuit• 1 month ago

In America I've never had a non-mobile ISP offer IPv6. At this point it would be best to recognize the sunk cost and give up on the migration. IPv6 will never reach the 100% needed to turn off IPv4.

lxgr7• 1 month ago

And I've only ever had v6, both on DOCSIS and fiber. Both observations are pretty useless in the grand scheme of things; actual adoption rates are what matter.

At this point it would be best to recognize the sunk cost and give up on the migration.

That's a pretty wild thing to say in the comment section of an article about v6 reaching 50% eyeballs-side deployment.

hdgvhicv14• 1 month ago

After 30 years, with 99% of servers and devices having been designed decades after ip6 was created, half of traffic is still ip4.

If that’s not a failure I hate to see what is.

hdgvhicv14• 1 month ago

Thugs are slowly moving. Another 5 years and most windows machines will support clat. Another 20 and most machines will hopefully support it. I wish it was embedded in the Linux kernel though as that increases the chance of your device working transparently on an IPv6 only subnet using slaac and the application creator doesn’t need to know anything other than their internal dhcp gets a 10.x address and everything works using 464.

I think the future is bright and most problems will be solved by 2040, and almost all by 2050.

throw0101a25• 1 month ago

IPv6 will never reach the 100% needed to turn off IPv4.

As was predicted in 1994:

      Furthermore, we note that, in all probability, there will be IPv4
      hosts on the Internet effectively forever.  IPng must provide
      mechanisms to allow these hosts to communicate, even after IPng
      has become the dominant network layer protocol in the Internet.

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1726#section-5.5

commandersaki10• 1 month ago

It was also predicted that the address exhaustion problem would be averted, in fact that was the purpose of v6. It failed to deliver.

theandrewbailey• 1 month ago

I've had IPv6 addresses on Comcast, Spectrum, and Verizon FIOS.

toast03• 1 month ago

Comcast does IPv6 (in most areas, at least), AT&T does IPv6 (was 6rd when I was a customer), CenturyLink (or whatever they're called today) had 6rd on DSL when I was a customer... and it made their CPE do terrible things so it needed to be disabled, but it was offered. My muni fiber ISP offers IPv6.

At this point it would be best to recognize the sunk cost and give up on the migration. IPv6 will never reach the 100% needed to turn off IPv4.

That was probably a reasonable take 15 years ago. But we're at 50% v6 globally, and the ISPs that are doing v6 + cgnat would not want to move all that v6 traffic to cgnat. v6 traffic is managed with stateless routing; cgnat is stateful and costly.

There are many lessons that can be learned, but v4 only is not the future. v6 only might never happen... people are going to keep running old software in emulation that will never support v6... But global routability of v4 will likely end one day. And I'd suspect the tail of the migration will be much shorter than the head was.

inigyou42• 1 month ago

If we have to give up on things that haven't reached 100%, shouldn't we give up on IPv4 first since that's even further away from 100%?

brador4• 1 month ago

2026. Literally no reason to be using this outdated limited addressing.

New regex: IP(any collection of numbers and dots).

Now we have infinite IP address possibilities and no one controls the space.

Done.

inigyou42• 1 month ago

What does a packet header look like?

mahboi25• 1 month ago

Need an IP address and a prompt explaining to Claude how to parse it

codingdave• 1 month ago

Do you think routers perform their work using the human-readable addresses?

If so, that is incorrect. They use the binary values. The actual difference between IPv4 and IPv6 is that IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses, not 32. So you can devise whatever human-readable abstraction you like, it won't change how networking actually operates.

brador4• 1 month ago

And there’s no reason we should be limited to 128. It’s all just so dated and stagnant.

Chips can be made that dwarf that limitation, instead we’re stuck with this decade old nonsense to “work around” again.

Flip flopping between “the code needs it” and “the chips need it”.

throw0101a25• 1 month ago

Specifically on weekends, which seems to indicate that it's the corporate/business network side of things that is not bothering with implementing it.

Scroll_Swe2• 1 month ago

You frame "not bothering" as if its a checkbox with "enable IPv6" to check and all done...

Put all work into reorg, for what? Some numbers to change? Why when IPv4 works?

calgoo• 1 month ago

The corporate world tend to be easy to do, just put a gateway to IPv6 on their zScaler (or similar) exit points and done. However, that is not really needed as they are "only" consuming a few IPs around the world (for that purpose). No one in the corporate world wants to go back to the days of Public IPs on all devices. Internally the enterprises have no reason to switch as it just complicates their setups.

xacky• 1 month ago

The real milestone is when it's over 50% all the time.

JdeBP2• 1 month ago

Just to add to the 'but the ISPs do not' anecdotes, it has been six months since someone last commented so it is probably time to mention this again on Hacker News:

* https://havevirginmediaenabledipv6yet.co.uk/

A major ISP in the U.K., that said in a public statement on World IPv6 Day in 2011 that

As well as our core and access networks being capable of supporting IPv6, we're rigorously testing our entire network to ensure that all customers have a smooth and simple transition when the time comes to flick the switch and turn IPv6 on. We're really pleased with how our tests are advancing and are happy to say that by the end of 2012, we'll be able to fully support customers looking to switch to IPv6.

has not managed to actually flick that switch in 15 years.

* https://ispreview.co.uk/story/2011/06/08/uk-isp-fluidata-hai...

jonathantf2• 1 month ago

Purely from a business perspective, for VM there is no point. They have more than enough v4 to keep them going, customers (outside of a tiny technical minority who probably wouldn't chose VM anyway) do not see any benefit.

That plus other ISPs v6 implementations breaking things randomly, I understand why they don't bother.

Hizonner2• 1 month ago

Right. Which is why this is not a choice businesses should be allowed to make.

lambdaone3• 1 month ago

The slow adoption of IPv6 by many older companies is at least in part a paradoxical result of the success of IPv6 elsewhere, particularly in new builds where there is practically no overhead in deploying IPv6 in a green-field environment - see for example the mobile telecoms market in developing countries, where new builds are IPv6-first.

This has taken pressure off the IPv4 legacy address pool, reducing the urgency for older providers.

End-users are typically completely unaware of whether their traffic is being carried over IPv6 or IPv4, and so simply do not care one way or the other. (This particular post is more than likely being made over IPv6, since news.ycombinator.com has an IPv6 address and my OS, browser, router and ISP all support IPv6 straight out of the box, as is now true for the majority of users in my country.)

globular-toast• 1 month ago

15 years is plenty of time to switch away from them. IPv6 is just one reason. It's a shit ISP. I ditched them as soon as I could and cited IPv6 as a reason, in case it made a difference (I also questioned my new ISP before I joined).

Virgin Media exist for two reasons: first they were given a monopoly by their Tory chums (Thatcher) and, second, all ISPs are allowed to make you sign absurdly long, anti-competitive contracts (18 months is common). If ISPs were treated the same as utility suppliers we'd probably be in a better place.

gertrunde2• 1 month ago

I once asked them if we could enable IPv6 on a 1Gb DIA circuit, and the response I got back was that "we can convert the circuit to IPv6, but you'll need to give up your IPv4."

I don't think I bothered asking them again!!

(Edit "them" = Virgin Media)

inigyou42• 1 month ago

Sure they didn't just mean they'd change your static IPv4 address to a different one?

mapkkk• 1 month ago

in my case, they did this without input from me.

I only found out because I could no longer access a swath of things I used to be able to.

not virgin media, but in the EU

djantje• 1 month ago

In NL we have this one: https://heeftodidoipv6.nl

Their core network has IPv6, but not their customers, 17% market share in telecom in the Netherlands.

Are there more?

wolvoleo8• 1 month ago

They also got hacked recently and all their customer details were published.

PS: From the millions of customers' details leaked it sounds like their market share is a hell of a lot higher than 17%!

heresie-dabord2• 1 month ago

After several decades, IPv6 has proven itself as a supplement to IPv4.

FireBeyond• 1 month ago

I finally managed to get Xfinity giving me a /60, and then figuring out a SLAAC setup that works across my layer 3 home network (mostly me realizing that SLAAC was the way to go versus trying to figure out DHCPv6 and Ubiquiti Edge stuff).

IgorPartola• 1 month ago

The way to pressure ISPs to support IPv6 is stupid but effective:

1. Sites that help shoppers choose can add a big visual red flag to any ISP that doesn’t support IPv6. Consumers don’t know what IPv6 is by and large but they do understand seeing a big red flag.

2. Same thing for websites. Add a banner that says “hey your ISP doesn’t support proper internet connectivity which this site utilizes. Contact them to let them know that you are having internet issues.” Again, consumers do not know what’s IPv6 is, but they do know what annoying banners are.

kvdveer• 1 month ago

What would be the incentive for site owners to reduce the appeal of their site? The user has connected to the site, so there's obviously no immediate problem.

kortilla4• 1 month ago

Regular person, “This site requires some weird technology, I’ll shop somewhere else.”

This is one of those “if everyone just” solutions that doesn’t work because shopping websites would never do that. Amazon has tons of evidence that even the slightest bits of friction result in noticeable drops in sales.

xp84• 1 month ago

From a US perspective, for your #1, the idea of people “shopping” for broadband, is astonishing. Most people here have available to them one single DOCSIS provider and that’s it. A few lucky ones have a FTTP option too, but that definitely not available to more than 25% of addresses.

(It’s true that you can use cellular for your home internet, but I consider that extremely compromised.)

GenerWork• 1 month ago

This will work on nerds (aka the HN crowd) but the average person will read that and wonder why they should care when the page loaded. Also, if you keep displaying the banner people will grow accustomed to it and ultimately ignore it.

yesturi• 1 month ago

I think this is a classic chicken and egg problem and the only way to solve this issue is government regulation. Anyone aware of the mandatory IPv6 in Europe? I heard that the Chech Republic is doing something about it. I Poland, only Orange and probably TMobile supports it, the smaller ones - almost none.

vitorgrs3• 1 month ago

I noticed when using some Chinese services, a lot of them have "IPv4" and "IPv6" flags when opening their apps for some reason.

mlyle2• 1 month ago

We're finally getting there in the US, though. Top ASNs are >75% IPv6 capable.

It's Optimum Communications and Frontier (my provider) that are really holding the numbers down at ~15% each. The latter is improving very slowly, but not a lot of evidence of change in the former.

JdeBP2• 1 month ago

Indeed. The U.S.A. is currently well above the U.K. in the APNIC statistics hyperlinked-to by the headlined article.

* https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6

vitorgrs3• 1 month ago

Here in Brazil most ISPs provide IPv6 by now... But what happens a lot, when field technician are installing your broadband, they just... don't configure IPv6. As if IPv4 (CGNAT!) wasn't enough. With bigger ISPs this is less common.

With mobile carriers this is even worse. For some reason, some default config are IPv4 by default, while literally all of them supports IPv6.

buggeryorkshire• 1 month ago

Having interviewed with them for a SRE role I can definitely see how they are awful. The amount of technical debt is hilarious.

marysol5• 1 month ago

If you sign up with + in your e-mail address, it breaks their backend too

Fun fun

axus• 1 month ago

When I set up a "pure" (not really) IPv6 server, was surprised that Github does not support it. Without the voluntary operations listed at https://nat64.xyz/ , they'd be unreachable from IPv6.

dapperdrake• 1 month ago

And the Internet routes around a problem, yet again.

Good example of the 2020s on why there is practically truly only one Internet instead of many.

boredatoms2• 1 month ago

Github’s lack of v6 is completely unforgivable

jessinra98• 1 month ago

Is IPv6 really that widely used? Mobile carriers use it almost exclusively, which is already a huge chunk of the internet, and newer ISPs are switching to it too.

zadikian3• 1 month ago

Almost all mobile carriers use v6, but not exclusively. They also hand out a v4 to every customer. The v6-only part is their internal network.

commandersaki10• 1 month ago

Still not fit for purpose.

adithyassekhar2• 1 month ago

Whenever I turn on ipv6 on my router (isp supports it, dual stack) randomly I get half the download speeds, YouTube video freezes, and eventually a captcha screen on google. The moment I disable v6 even only at the client side I get to max out my bandwidth. Tested on google drive, sites on azure and aws and netflix’s fast.com which show’s your ip just to confirm I was connecting over v6.

mahboi25• 1 month ago

Maybe your ISP is really tunneling v6 over v4?

adithyassekhar2• 26 days ago

No the server is getting an ipv6 address and verified on those test sites. This seems bad routing.

bilsbie2• 1 month ago

It’s weird we’re all still behind NATs. IPv6 was supposed to be trillions of devices all having their own ip.

inigyou42• 1 month ago

On IPv6 we're not. Are you saying it's weird we still use IPv4 in addition?

bilsbie2• 1 month ago

So when I go to hn.com I’m on v4?

hugodan• 1 month ago

In Portugal one of the biggest ISPs (NOS) still does not have IPv6

CrLf4• 1 month ago

That's not exactly true, they've been increasing in the last few months and are close to 30% now. Let's hope they don't revert it like one year ago.

This graph even shows them doing step deployments:

https://radar.cloudflare.com/adoption-and-usage/as2860?dateR...

sherburt34• 1 month ago

Literally all we had to do was add a byte to IPv4 and we'd be done but noooo we need to overengineer the next protocol and make it as painful as possible to adopt.

inigyou42• 1 month ago

Why one byte? Is that enough bytes? An extra 4 bits each for source and destination? Maxing out at 2^36 addresses? That seems uncomfortably small safety margin.

sherburt34• 1 month ago

I was saying adding a byte to the address so its a 40 bit address which would be two bytes to the header. Obviously it would still have the same issue where hardware and software would be incompatible and would need to be replaced but the same concepts that worked in IPv4 would work in my fake protocol instead of IPv6 where the network needs to be redesigned from the ground up.

Also IPv6 addresses are ugly

convolvatron2• 1 month ago

this keeps coming up, if you add a byte to ipv4 you still have a transition problem. 5 byte machines can't talk to 4 byte machines. pretty much the only thing that solves is people not liking the :: syntax. the only other change is auto configuration, which...kind of doesn't matter? is that really causing problems?

mahboi25• 1 month ago

Yeah but they could've picked something that at least lets the 4 byte host talk to a 5 byte one. Like if I have 8.8.8.8 and they want to give me 8.8.8.8.0, cool. Or make it 8 bytes instead of 5, same thing.

sherburt34• 1 month ago

I think the addresses are a big issue. The address space is just stupid big, I don't understand why we need to prepare for every grain of sand on Earth having a WiFi chip in it.

Most people can pick up calculating subnets in their head in ipv4 pretty quickly and ipv4 addresses are easy to memorize on accident. My brain turns to mush as soon as I start seeing hexadecimal characters in addresses.

TacticalCoder• 1 month ago

... but noooo we need to overengineer ...

We need to pretend we overengineer. But some in the committee made it sure data exfil would be basically impossible to detect / block with IPv6, which all the others, always in love with the most rube-goldberg design possibles, loved the "overengineered" solution.

With rube-goldberg designs, you can then always say stuff like:

"The xz backdoor was TOTALLY unrelated to systemd"

Yet it only concerned distro that shipped with systemd.

Go figure.

It's always "because insert-crazy-non-sensical-hair-pulling-reason-here".

Ah yes, it's because of that. So it's so totally unrelated right?

Except it still only affect distro using systemd.

Or maybe, you know, backdoors and exfils were the plan from the very start.

"The protocol won't work correctly unless you let crazy ping packets doing you-know-what". And nobody is ever going to properly firewall all that.

Overengineering is one thing, yes.

But we know for a fact that there are xxxINTs infiltrating committees and pushing "solutions" that are only solutions to them.

Dagger225• 1 month ago

Data exfil is basically impossible to detect/block with IPv6? What? No. It's no easier or harder than it is in v4.

I'd also question the Rube-Goldberg-ness part, given how straightforward v6 is compared to the contortions we go through to get v4 to work in the face of address exhaustion.

(I guess I'll just ignore the systemd rant.)

bluGill• 1 month ago

That would be just as hard to switch to and even more complex. If you think ipv6 is over engineered you haven't had to deal with ipv4. (Source routing is a pain)

ck2• 1 month ago

is it because some cellphone carriers are now completely ipv6 externally like t-mobile?

radiator• 1 month ago

All the projects I have ever worked on, the internal networks always were IPv4. Maybe because it is much simpler for humans to have an overview of the internal subnets in that way. Maybe IPv6 uses numbers that are too large for us.

kccqzy• 1 month ago

The IPv6 addresses on my internal network look like fd7a::1, fd7a::2, etc. They are shorter than v4 addresses.

Jerry2• 1 month ago

FTA:

Individual economies such as India, Viet Nam, and Saudi Arabia exhibit adoption curves that differ markedly from the global average. As the APNIC Labs data shows, this global trend does not necessarily reflect the experience of individual economies.
APNIC’s own measurement records a 42% worldwide IPv6 capability (Figure 2). That’s a substantial difference, which also needs clarifying."

The nuance is that IPv6 is growing faster in developing countries with poorer economies. I'm guessing this is because building modern IPv6 network from scratch is cheaper & more efficient than acquiring scarce and expensive IPv4 addresses. This is a major advantage for newer providers in growing economies.

So while the Google is showing it at 50%, APNIC's weighted global measurement shows it at 42%.

wolvoleo8• 1 month ago

I have it switched off on most networks and servers including my home network. I just don't need it here and I have zero to do with asia.

I wish they had just made an IPv5 though. With e.g. 6 bytes instead of 4. 65535 times the current internet should be plenty. I feel like IPv6 is overengineered and I'm glad it didn't take off yet. I like being able to memorise IP addresses, it really helps testing.

If I ever do switch it on on my home network I'll probably use NAT on the router so I can still keep it exclusively IPv4 internally on the network.

I first learned about IPv6 when I was studying (1993) and I already felt like it was an overengineered monstrosity back then. They were campaigning like it would be the internet next year. Well that aged well, lol. That's now 33 years ago.

I truly think that if they had made it simpler and more IPv4 compatible we would have been moved over in 2-3 years. But no they had to keep supporting this thing. Well, at this point I'm going to avoid playing ball as long as I can.

eddd-ddde• 1 month ago

I like being able to memorise IP addresses, it really helps testing.

This is even easier with IPv6. At work we have a bunch of test devices, and you calculate the IPv6 from the device's serial number. Simple as that, no memorization at all.

wolvoleo8• 1 month ago

But for an IPv4 device I only have to remember one number :) And nothing to do with a long random serial number.

lambdaone3• 1 month ago

A changeover to your IPv5 would be just as agonizing as the changeover to IPv6. A system with a larger address space is fundamentally uninteroperable with one with a smaller address space as there is nowhere to put the extra bits in the old protocol. The lack of motivation to move to the new protocol would also be just the same.

And as for memorization: do you actually memorize MAC addresses for your interfaces? The answer is no, you don't, becase ARP handles all that for you. Well, for IPv6, DNS, mDNS and so on handles all that for both your IPv4 and your IPv6 addresses - or should, if you know what you are doing, as memorizing IPs doesn't really scale beyond a few dozen machines.

Yes, IPv6 is overengineered, but it gets the pain of having larger addresses in the packet done once and for all - the odds of needing more than 128 bits in the rest of human history are very small indeed. And if something radically new needs to replace the current IPv6 architecture, which is much more likely, the extra address bits are already there; only 2000::/3 is assigned for public use so far, and the new addresses would fit in the current IPv6 packet format already.

wolvoleo8• 1 month ago

Yeah but that ridiculous overdimensioning is something I object to. There's more IPs than is needed to give each grain of sand on this planet its whole IPv4-sized internet. That's just overkill.

And the problem seems to be solving itself as the world is turning its back on globalism. China and North Korea already have separated themselves. Iran too. China still uses the same address space but it's not like there's open connectivity with the rest of the world. We'll probably cut off Russia at some point completely as part of some sanction (they've been preparing for that for years), and Europe will break with America if things continue. We'll just have interoperability at a few controlled border points then, like China already does with its great firewall. It'll be easy to do some address translation then.

Ps that's not something I'm necessarily happy about but I do see this trend emerging of every region trying to wall itself off.

cynicalkane• 1 month ago

One big advantage of IPv6 local addresses is that you can pack a lot of semantic information in an address that's easy to remember, plus bits to help with routing and/or firewalling if you need.

DNS and mDNS don't "just work". You don't need but probably really want HA for DNS which is overkill for a homelab user, and you really want a fixed address for that DNS, because who wants to fix issues when you can't even address your services, and you really want your routers to have fixed addresses for the same reasons; you need VLAN and/or Avahi reflecting for mDNS, and if you need firewalling on your LAN, have fun dealing with the fact that mDNS clients prefer GUAs, then IPv4s, then ULAs in that order, by RFC rule, and managing GUAs sensibly when your ISP keeps changing your prefix -- well, IPv6 is almost 30 years old and home/SMB equipment still can't handle that reliably or flexibly, if it even lets you do anything besides assign /64s, and there's nothing stopping your ISP from saying "here just have a single /64, sorry if you wanted to actually use IPv6 for anything clever like having multiple subnets, who would ever want that?" So you say "I'll just use DHCPv6" and it turns out that DHCPv6 kind of sucks and it also turns out many devices don't support that by default or at all, including every single Android and Chrome device, for starters.

IPv6 is full of these design issues where you have a lot of things that are supposed to Just Work, Look It's So Much Simpler Than IPv4, and look at all these address bytes (excuse us while we take 64 of them away for no reason), except you discover that nothing Just Works with anything else in mildly nontrivial cases. You end up on a yak shave only to discover no yak underneath, and you end up just having a broken network while standing in a pile of yak hair. The whole story above is just one example. IPv6 is a migraine in RFC form, and if it weren't that I accidentally bought some expensive IOT devices that are IPv6-only, I'd be happy to never touch it. At this point, it would have been a better time-money tradeoff to have thrown those in the trash as soon as I had seen the problem.

mahboi25• 1 month ago

If ipv5 worked just like ipv4 except with a larger address space, it would be easier than moving to ipv6. I shouldn't have to change my address to switch for example.

the_real_cher2• 1 month ago

I dont think its that over engineered for what its capable of.

mahboi25• 1 month ago

That's what overengineered implies, it's capable of things you don't need. The problem with v6 isn't 128-bit addrs though.

Hikikomori3• 1 month ago

An IPv5 would have all the same issues switching over to it. Its been proposed so many times over the years.

zadikian3• 1 month ago

Not necessarily. I've gone down this rabbit hole in another thread, tldr there are alternatives that would've been easier initially but with the downside of leaving the routes fragmented.

mahboi25• 1 month ago

If they're going to make ipv5, might as well make it 8 bytes instead of 4

matja• 1 month ago

I feel like IPv6 is overengineered

In what metrics? IPv6 is more simple to implement than IPv4. In Linux 7.1.1 IPv4 is 84kLOC, IPv6 is 59kLOC.

agnishom• 1 month ago

Finally some good news in 2026

tulio_ribeiro• 1 month ago

Cloudflare shows a 59/41 split: https://radar.cloudflare.com/adoption-and-usage?dateStart=20...

HE shows 41% ASNs support v6: https://ipv6.he.net/

j16sdiz• 1 month ago

The real question is -- how much of them are bot traffic?

We knew bot traffic is more than half of the internet, right?

Dagger225• 1 month ago

If my firewall logs are representative, about 2%.

whatever13• 1 month ago

I would love to stop paying AWS for public ipv4 addresses.

But simply it is impossible to go full ipv6, as many of isps of the clients do not support it.

Currently there is no pressure to the isps to move to ipv6. In fact the incentives are OPPOSITE! They love charging for static IPs.

budoso• 1 month ago

To be fair if Google stopped supporting it that’d be a pretty good incentive for the ISPs to get in line.

whatever13• 1 month ago

That is a great idea actually. It would be awesome to be implemented like 2-3 years ago. Now I don't think it will work at global scale, since the world looks for any excuse to move away from American influence.

tgma3• 1 month ago

Is this a failure? Absolutely. The article tries to brush this off, but there is no denying it. Operating without an IPv4 stack is not going to happen with v6.

Dagger225• 1 month ago

I have no v4 on this machine. I'd disable the v4 stack on it if that was a thing Linux could do, but as it stands it's just sitting there doing nothing.

The thing you're claiming is not going to happen is something I'm already doing.

tgma3• 30 days ago

I was talking about internet at large. You, and many clients, are of course able to do it on your box, but to use the whole internet, you will at some point hit a translation point which uses v4. The point is the internet at large is never going to reach a point where there won't be two internets; at this point it is pretty clear v6-only will not be a thing with the current set of technologies before a future protocol supersedes one or both.

birb07• 1 month ago

Globally, it’s 50%, but local French (>85%) businesses could already go IPv6-only and force others to adopt it

decorner• 1 month ago

When your router ships with IPv6 default on, this makes sense

anonymouscaller• 1 month ago

https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

I've never seen this chart before, was taking a peek from the link in the article. Does anyone with networking knowledge know why IPv6 usage peaks on Saturdays and dips during the middle of the week? (something related to mobile ISPs?)

Dagger225• 1 month ago

People are at work during the week, and work networks have a lower average deployment of v6 then home networks do. As evidence, you can also see the impact of holidays and COVID-19 lockdowns on the size of the dips.

tonymet• 1 month ago

it’s safe to say that we will never see total adoption, not within 2 generations. We will taper around 65% at best.

Think about the migration plan, and nearly every positive force to move to ipv6 has been exhausted. Routing hardware, consumer hardware, server hardware & software all have the capability. Mobile deployments were a big driver of ipv6, and that didn’t reach the level of adoption expected. Now hosting providers are charging for ipv4 addresses, and it’s not having a measurable impact.

Most migrations start to hit the hockey stick well before this stage, and the taper occurs around 95%+ when outlier hardware or legacy devices are the last remnants. We are not seeing a pattern like that here.

Animats• 1 month ago

IPv6 adoption has been increasing linearly for about 15 years now. Growth rate is about 3% - 4% a year, not compounded.

Some long infrastructure transitions:

- Railroad freight car bearings. First roller bearing freight cars, 1948 ("Roller Freight!"). Roller bearings mandatory for car interchange between railoads, 1994.

- 100 VDC power distribution. Started in the 19th century, still widespread in the 1950s in older cities. Grand Central Station finally got rid of the last DC circuits, other than subway traction power, in the 1990s. (Grand Central had everything - 120 VDC, 60Hz AC, 40Hz AC, 25Hz AC, 600VDC, and a basement full of rotary converters.)

Transitions that should have happened by now:

- Europe is still using those crappy buffer and chain freight car couplers. Everybody knows they're crap, but the Eurocoupler initiative of the 1970s failed and the Digital Automatic Coupler is still slogging towards implementation.

HackerThemAll• 1 month ago

France over 85%, Germany 75%, and on the other side of the scale Italy 20%, Poland and Turkey 18%, Spain 11%, former Yugoslavia bloc from 0 to at most 9. Slovenia at 7.5%...

Google Hits 50% IPv6

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