Over 25% of Verizon Wireless Traffic Is Now Over IPv6

http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/blog/2013/04/over-25-of-verizon-wireless-traffic-is-now-over-ipv6/

by vy8vWJlco • 13 years ago

77 26 13 years ago

NelsonMinar2• 13 years ago

At first read I thought the headline meant that 25% of consumer traffic was going to IPv6 sites, which seems impossibly high. But the article says "This reflects the fact that IPv6 is part of Verizon’s rollout of LTE". Does that mean IPv6 is all just internal in Verizon's network and invisible to consumers? If I have an LTE iPhone on Verizon, is it even capable of talking to an IPv6 site?

Related, from links in the article: Google has a graph showing that over 1% of their users now have IPv6 available. http://www.google.com/ipv6/statistics.html

xhrpost• 13 years ago

I just checked whatismyipv6.com from my LTE Verizon phone and it returned an IPv6 address. The site itself can be access from IPv4 as well but it will inform you if this happens.

zaphoyd5• 13 years ago

From what I can gather the traffic figures reported by the ipv6 launch site (25% for Verizon Wireless) are traffic in/out of the various ASNs listed. So it is in fact 25% of Verizon Wireless's customer traffic is over IPv6 to IPv6 enabled content.

This is actually not as strange as it might seem. Google/Bing/Facebook/Youtube/Netflix/Wikipedia and the iTunes store are all available over IPv6. These properties represent a significant portion of typical mobile device traffic. That 11% of the remaining Alexa top 1000 properties are IPv6 enabled doesn't hurt either. Lastly, practically 100% of VZW's LTE customers are using handsets and operating systems that support IPv6 so they don't have the issues Comcast has with ancient home routers and modems stopping people from using the v6 service that is provided.

NelsonMinar2• 13 years ago

Thanks for clarifying this! So this 25% really is consumer traffic, and Verizon is so high because they default to preferring IPv6 servers when available? That's great news for IPv6 adoption. It's also consistent with what's reported later in the article, about IPv6 prevalence at various other installations.

ejdyksen2• 13 years ago

> If I have an LTE iPhone on Verizon, is it even capable of talking to an IPv6 site?

Yes. All LTE devices on Verizon are given real, globally routable IPv6 addresses. You can test this here: http://test-ipv6.com.

This presentation [1] is pretty interesting, showing how aggressive Verizon was with IPv6 on their LTE network.

> At first read I thought the headline meant that 25% of consumer traffic was going to IPv6 sites, which seems impossibly high.

Keep in mind that many popular websites--Yahoo, Facebook and Google among them--now publish AAAA records in DNS. With that in mind, this statistic isn't that unreasonable. If you have a Verizon iPhone, you're probably reaching Google via IPv6 without realizing it.

[1] http://conference.apnic.net/__data/assets/pdf_file/0017/5081...

twoodfin3• 13 years ago

> Yes. All LTE devices on Verizon are given real, globally routable IPv6 addresses.

With globally routable addresses, where is the protection for attached devices from global attacks? Does VZW firewall their network, or are they relying on their supported devices not having open, vulnerable ports?

josteink• 13 years ago

> If you have a Verizon iPhone, you're probably reaching Google via IPv6 without realizing it.

Which is the only way it should ever be.

umsm• 13 years ago

I'm surprised that DreamHost is listed at over 29%...

zaphoyd5• 13 years ago

Dreamhost was one of the first major shared hosting providers to make adding IPv6 addresses to your sites dead simple. I wouldn't be surprised if this has attracted a number of early adopting IPv6 customers.

le• 13 years ago

They also account for an infinitesimally small amount of global net traffic. Their rapid adoption of IPv6 is more symbolic than anything else. And it got them mentioned here, so presumably it was a success.

Aloisius• 13 years ago

Google is reporting that 2.5% of the US is using IPv6, 2.3% of Germany and 5.2% of France. That's far higher than I would have thought.

paxswill• 13 years ago

It's not too surprising to see SPAWAR [0] up so high; the US Department of Defense has required IPv6 compatibility for devices being added to their networks for a while now (I think around 2003)[1]. If you scroll a bit further down the list, Defense Research and Engineering Network (DREN) is at 8.32% as well.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_and_Naval_Warfare_Systems...

[1] http://www.usipv6.com/ppt/IPv6SummitPresentationFinalCaptDix...

EvanKelly• 13 years ago

SPAWAR Pacific began their IPv6 transition pilot in 2003. You can read some of the lessons learned here [0].

[0] http://fcw.com/articles/2010/08/17/navy-shares-ipv6-lessons....

Over 25% of Verizon Wireless Traffic Is Now Over IPv6

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