5% of Google's traffic is now IPv6

http://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#5percent

by AndrewDucker • 12 years ago

155 65 12 years ago

Strom• 12 years ago

See previous discussion on this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8680652

The one thing I gather from that graph is that over weekends, IPv6 use spikes. I assume that this means that networks or devices at companies and schools are lagging behind at using IPv6?

matthewarkin• 12 years ago

Yea, there could be a number of reasons for this. Companies may not see a need to upgrade to IPv6 just yet, all their internal machines have nat-ed addresses and they have enough public ip addresses. They use some legacy software / hardware X that doesn't support IPv6 (hey, some companies are still paying Microsoft to support XP).

skrause2• 12 years ago

Or when I look at the company I work for it's just that nobody bothers because not having IPv6 hasn't caused a single problem so far.

sargun2• 12 years ago

Corporate IT tends to lag in these sorts of things. Given that most people have ISP provided CPE, and that's the only device in their homes, it allows the ISP to have a much easier time migrating that user to IPv6. The rollout mechanisms have been well studied.

On the other hand, corporations tend not to have the same level of skill, and focus in terms of networking as an ISP, like a Comcast, or an AT&T. Additionally, they're not as incentivized to move everyone to IPv6, because often times, it's easier, cheaper, and more realistic to buy some IPs.

Moving to IPv6 at the office is a difficult project for most, as there is still a ton of enterprise gear that's IPv6-less. Even at that, enabling enterprise applications with IPv6 tends to be a massive nightmare. Lastly, the security implications of IPv6 are not well understood by most people in the corporate environment.

organsnyder4• 12 years ago

In the United States, Comcast is one of the largest ISPs that has deployed IPv6, and they've (purportedly) rolled it out to 100% of their residential customers (with supported CPE). However, they're still working on their IPv6 deployment for business customers (still in trial, availability "any day now"). This could account for a lot of it, especially in the US.

mtrimpe• 12 years ago

I hope everyone is aware that IPv6 is the perfect way to bypass rate-limiting for systems that analyse Google results (for SEO ea.)

There's a good chance a lot of this traffic consists of those bots testing Google's results ....

skrause2• 12 years ago

Rate-limiting is still easy with IPv6, you just limit whole subnets (e.g. a /64) instead of single IP addresses. I guess Google has figured that out as well.

I actually do believe that this is real traffic. Here in Germany the number of connections with native IPv6 is rising constantly. At home all my devices are always using IPv6 when connecting to Google services because I also have native IPv6. Those 12.26% for Germany look pretty believable.

DieBuche• 12 years ago

In Germany anyone on the telekom network who has a new contract or changed an exisiting contract in the last 16 months or so has IPv6.

zaphoyd2• 12 years ago

I've noticed similar stats on my own IPv6 enabled sites. Last year a non-tech conference I worked on the registration system for had a similar fraction (of the non-spam paying registrants) signing up via v6.

NKCSS• 12 years ago

Cool to see Belgium at almost 30%... we can learn something from our neighbours (only 2.5% here in .nl)

sargun2• 12 years ago

I wonder if this will lead to Docker finally acknowledging IPv6:

° https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/2174

° https://github.com/docker/docker/pull/8947

° https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/3609

etc...

https://github.com/docker/docker/search?q=ipv6&type=Issues&u...

AndrewDucker3• 12 years ago

Worth noting that the traffic is more than doubling every 12 months.

2.5% in December 2013

1% in December 2012

0.4% in December 2011

0.2% in December 2010

If that carries on then it's 10% in 2015, 20% in 2016, and 40% in 2017, with everyone switched over somewhere in 2018/19.

richmarr2• 12 years ago

80% in 2018

160% in 2019

Apologies for being flippant. Just making the point that you're extrapolating without spending time on the likely shape of that adoption.

It seems more likely that this is an S-curve, and that we'll continue to see IPv4 traffic for the next decade, maybe longer.

AndrewDucker3• 12 years ago

I think it pretty likely that once we reach 50% it will switch from "That thing that techies care about" to "Something people assume everyone has", and that any remaining ISPs that don't provide IPv6 will rush to get it done.

I'm sure that IPv4 support will continue for a fair while though.

tazjin2• 12 years ago

In the meantime Google Compute Engine does not support IPv6.

kawsper• 12 years ago

I am also waiting on IPv6 support from MaxCDN.

kalleboo2• 12 years ago

Same with Amazon EC2 - they only support it on their load balancers

theandrewbailey2• 12 years ago

Many residential ISPs don't. I'm stuck on Verizon to enable IPv6 on FIOS.

tazjin2• 12 years ago

My ISP at home (Bahnhof) actually offers IPv6, I haven't asked them to activate it yet though.

dan1234• 12 years ago

Non of the major UK ISPs seem to be passed the planning stage and my mobile network seems to be using carrier grade NAT.

microtonal2• 12 years ago

I am on IPv6-only (Kabel BW, Germany), IPv4 goes over DS-Lite.

2bluesc2• 12 years ago

Comcast in San Francisco supports native IPv6 on residential accounts. Even did it (almost) right and include a /60 prefix delegation.

liveoneggs• 12 years ago

I think the US is mostly mobile

zaphoyd2• 12 years ago

Comcast and Time Warner Cable both have larged wired IPv6 footprints (28% and 12% of their quite sizable customer bases respectively), as do a number of universities.

atomt2• 12 years ago

And AT&T with their huge 6rd deployment for DSL.

kibwen• 12 years ago

Can anyone explain what "latency / impact" means on the per-country graph? I can't quite make sense of it:

United Kingdom: 0ms latency, 0.02% impact

Romania: -10ms latency, 0.01% impact

Bulgaria: 10ms latency, 0.03% impact

Japan: 20ms latency, 0.03% impact

All that I can divine so far is that 20ms appears to be the threshold at which your country will receive a red tint regardless of your adoption percentage.

icebraining• 12 years ago

I believe the latency is the difference vis-a-vis IPv4.

skywhopper• 12 years ago

Two comments about the presentation itself:

1. The color selections on the "Per-country IPv6 Adoption" tab are abysmal for those of us with poor color perception.

2. Since we're talking about replacing outdated technology, why use a Flash-based graph on the "IPv6 Adoption" tab?

dhm• 12 years ago

The graphic in the "Per-Country IPv6 adoption" tab appears to be implemented with scalable vector graphics.

zacwest• 12 years ago

My ISP here in SF, Webpass, has begun deploying their customers behind an IPv4 NAT with an IPv6 /64 prefix. I think this trend is going to be more common with consumer ISPs. I mind a little bit, since VPN access is impossible on IPv4, but with mobile carriers deploying IPv6 I think I will care less as time goes on.

It is noticeably faster to use IPv6 with Google, something like 4ms vs. 30ms connection times. I'm not sure if it's a more efficient route, or underutilized routers handling the traffic.

pwr22• 12 years ago

UK is still abysmal :(

smcl• 12 years ago

Has anyone got any idea what the (relatively) big spike on October 4th 2014 was? A quick google revealed it's not some "World IPV6 day" or something (though there was something like that on 2011 which had a next-to-zero impact).

Was there maybe a new phone or console (or an OS update released to either) released?

Caketh• 12 years ago

I would hazard a guess that that was when global routing table hit 512K routes and crashed a few hundred ISP routers worldwide? That might have been earlier in the year though.

IvyMike2• 12 years ago

This seems like a good place to ask--I'm on Time Warner. I have an ipv6 address, and can get to ipv6.google.com, so it seems like everything is in place. But all my web browsing (chrome or ff, Windows 7) defaults to use ipv4 everywhere.

Is there something I need to change on my end? I've got pretty vanilla settings. Thanks!

organsnyder4• 12 years ago

There are a few potential factors in play:

1. What kind of IPv6 connectivity do you have? If it's not a native deployment, it could be 6rd or 6to4. I believe that some applications/OSes will prefer IPv4 over non-native IPv6 when they have the choice, since the latter will be running through a proxy (and therefore will probably be slower).

2. It could be an OS setting. I think that most recent OSes will prefer IPv6 by default, but I could be mistaken.

3. Application settings could also be in play.

I installed a Chrome extension named "IPvFoo" that adds an indicator in the address bar to tell me whether I'm connecting over IPv4 or IPv6. When I'm at home (Comcast residential, native dual-stack), it shows me connecting over IPv6 a lot of the time, especially when I'm connected to larger sites; in fact, the majority of sites connect over IPv6 at least partially, since many popular services (Google Analytics, Google Fonts, some common CDNs for Javascript libraries) are available over v6.

Perhaps this will help you figure out what's going on: http://test-ipv6.comcast.net/

IvyMike2• 12 years ago

I spent some time checking into things, and here's what appears to be happening:

1. I do get an IPv6 address from Time-Warner... and it appears to be legit. (It's not the link-local address; it starts with 2605:e000, which is in the Time-Warner block)

2. But... it appears to be non-routable from the general internet. I think this is Time-Warner's fault. But maybe it's my router. I am not sure. Traceroute from http://4or6.com/traceroute?l=en gives me this. (I attempted to obfuscate my real address with XXXX)

    #traceroute 2605:e000:xxxx
    traceroute to 2605:e000:xxxx (2605:e000:xxxx), 30 hops max, 80 byte packets
     1  2607:f2f8:1600::1 (2607:f2f8:1600::1)  1.653 ms  1.597 ms  1.583 ms  
     2  2001:504:13::1a (2001:504:13::1a)  11.753 ms  11.746 ms  11.732 ms
     3  twcable-backbone-as7843.10gigabitethernet17.switch2.lax2.he.net (2001:470:0:2bf::2)  2.618 ms  2.610 ms  2.599 ms
     4  2001:1998:0:4::11d (2001:1998:0:4::11d)  3.956 ms 2001:1998:0:4::11b (2001:1998:0:4::11b)  3.477 ms 2001:1998:0:4::11d (2001:1998:0:4::11d)  5.512 ms
     5  2001:1998:0:8::83 (2001:1998:0:8::83)  4.090 ms  5.784 ms 2001:1998:0:8::87 (2001:1998:0:8::87)  6.542 ms
     6  2605:e000:0:4::41 (2605:e000:0:4::41)  6.753 ms  5.032 ms  5.011 ms
     7  2605:e000:0:4::5:7f (2605:e000:0:4::5:7f)  6.859 ms  7.042 ms  7.128 ms
     8  * * *

3. Since a recent firmware upgrade, my router detects this problem, and sometimes (but not always) decides to set up a 6to4 tunnel. I am not sure how this works, exactly.

4a. If the router does set up the 6to4 tunnel, I do have IPv6, but as organsnyder says, since 6to4 tunnels suck, the OS prefers to use ipv4.

4b. If the router does not set up the 6to4 tunnel, I have a completely non-functional IPv6.

Oh well, maybe next year.

X-Istence2• 12 years ago

This is only going to grow as ISP's start running out of IPv4 space and deploy IPv6 with IPv4 over CGN or some other solution!

dzhiurgis• 12 years ago

Are there any VPS providers in UK that support IPv6?

The idea would be to set up personal VPN that would exit thru IPv6 and/or get anonymomized on a public IPV4 NAT. Would that make sense?

blfr• 12 years ago

Digital Ocean supports IPv6 in their London DC. But if you just want a tunnel, it's much easier to get one from HE[1], or SixXS[2] than set up your own VPN. It's not anonymous though.

[1] Their London PoP is not accepting new users right now https://tunnelbroker.net/new_tunnel.php

[2] Two PoPs in London https://www.sixxs.net/pops/

organsnyder4• 12 years ago

Why go through all the trouble? Just get a free tunnel from Hurricane Electric (https://tunnelbroker.net/). Their site mentions that they have servers in London.

If anonymity is your goal, then a VPS probably wouldn't be much help—you'd be traced right back to your VPS provider, so you'd still be hoping that they wouldn't divulge your information. Since a VPS is normally on a static IP, it'd be slightly worse than a typical dynamic IP from a residential ISP.

jleahy• 12 years ago

Although they're still using Adobe Flash Player for the graph.

guyht• 12 years ago

29% in Belgium, any idea why they are so far ahead of everyone else?

5% of Google's traffic is now IPv6

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