
iOS9 already driving IPv6 uptake - MAshadowlocked
https://thestack.com/iot/2015/09/23/apples-ios9-already-driving-ipv6-uptake/
======
sandstrom
There are two recent, positive things Apple has done for IPv6:

1\. They updated the Happy Eyeballs algorithm[1], which is what's caused the
jump in the article.

2\. Apple will mandate IPv6 support in all apps starting early 2016[2].

[1] [https://www.ietf.org/mail-
archive/web/v6ops/current/msg22455...](https://www.ietf.org/mail-
archive/web/v6ops/current/msg22455.html)

[2]
[https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=08282015a](https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=08282015a)

~~~
digi_owl
"Happy Eyeballs"? Is that the official name, or another case of Apple re-
branding?

~~~
thelibrarian
"Happy Eyeballs" (aka Fast Fallback) was created and named by Dan Wing and
Andrew Yourtchenko of Cisco. And yes, "Happy eyeballs" is the official name
(named because of how happy the eyes of the users will be when they see how
fast their IPv6 connection falls back to an IPv4 connection when connecting to
a host that does not support IPv6).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Eyeballs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Eyeballs)

~~~
p1mrx
Happy Eyeballs is primarily designed let users with broken networks continue
connecting to dual-stack web servers. In some cases, it also covers up
brokenness on the server end (e.g. publishing AAAA records to nowhere), but
that's arguably more of a bug than a feature.

Back in 2011, content providers were terrified of enabling IPv6, because the
data showed that ~0.1% of users would drop off the map due to broken networks.
Happy Eyeballs helped to break the logjam.

------
MBCook
> CloudFlare’s graph shows a 1.07 increase in IPv6 requests under iOS9:

I'm curious: is this written correctly? The number of IPv6 request did go up
by 1.07%. But the way it's phrased I would think they'd be referring to the
percentage compared to before... a 33% increase.

Is this one of those cases where English can be ambiguous? Or to be correct
does it need to be changed to something like "CloudFlare’s graph shows an
additional 1.07% of requests use IPv6 under iOS9"?

~~~
wmf
It's a 1 percentage point increase and also a 33 percent increase.

~~~
teej
It's a 107 basis point increase.

~~~
simoncion
It's a 1.07% increase. Not all that many people know what basis points are. ;)

~~~
cbr
It's a 33% increase, or an increase of 1.07 percentage points. It's not a
1.07% increase.

~~~
simoncion
Hmm. As _old_ as the concept of percentages is, you'd think that there would
be a good symbol to indicate an increase in percentage points.

~~~
dragonwriter
> As old as the concept of percentages is, you'd think that there would be a
> good symbol to indicate an increase in percentage points.

Uh, there is such a notation -- (sign)(# of percentage points change)pp. Or,
in the instant case, +1.07pp.

(Though it would probably be more ideal if %p were accepted instead of pp,
because then there would be a natural extention to ‰p, etc.)

~~~
simoncion
I rather like %p.

What would ‰p mean? Percent-degree-points?

~~~
dragonwriter
"Per-milleage" [0] points (same relation to per-mille as percentage points are
to percent; 1 percentage point = 10 per-milleage points = 100 basis points.)

[0] I have no idea if there is a standard term for this, and if there is,
that's probably not it.

------
RobAtticus
A graph I like to check from time-to-time is Google's IPv6 stats:

[https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html](https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html)

Nearing 10% worldwide

~~~
niccl
Curious that it spikes at the weekends: approx 15% more ipv6 at weekends than
during the week.

~~~
tedunangst
Residential is driving uptake more than businesses.

------
acqq
I've visited [http://test-ipv6.com/](http://test-ipv6.com/) using iOS9 and the
results both over my mobile and cable operators are the same:

"No IPv6 address detected [more info]

It looks like you have only IPv4 Internet service at this time. Don't feel bad
- _most people are in this position right now. Most Internet service providers
are not quite yet ready_ to provide IPv6 Internet to residential customers."

Obviously it's not the computers or mobile phones that are the problem.

------
mustpax
Anyone have reading suggestions for an operationally minded infrastructure
engineer who is paranoid about security and hates breaking production but
still wants to take the IPv6 plunge?

~~~
azernik
For preparing your applications for the eventual flip-the-switch transition;
pay particular attention to sections 4.2, which describes a strategy
(supported by Linux) for handing off the grunt-work of dual-stack to the
kernel while making your userspace code only speak IPv6:
[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4038](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4038)

For a quick overview of the process of making your infrastructure dual-stack
(with an aim to eventually phase out IPv4); note that most of the burden is on
your networking-equipment vendor to make this work, unless you make your
layer-3 equipment in-house. So it's mostly a deployment challenge, rather than
a development challenge. [http://www.networkworld.com/article/2285078/tech-
primers/ipv...](http://www.networkworld.com/article/2285078/tech-primers/ipv6
--dual-stack-where-you-can--tunnel-where-you-must.html)

If I might recommend a good tunnel broker for allowing you to deploy IPv6
internally and get connectivity to the global v6 internet even without ISP
support, take a look at Hurricane Electric.

------
tajen
I maintain many Debian VPS for my product and I had to ditch all IPv6-enabled
servers because they were so slow. Like, they couldn't pass the apt-get step.

Which researching before posting this answer, I just noticed that it is due to
DNS timing out for IPv6 requests [1]. IPv6 is hard to set up.

[1]
[https://www.sixxs.net/faq/dns/?faq=ipv6slowconnect](https://www.sixxs.net/faq/dns/?faq=ipv6slowconnect)

~~~
hroi
When was this? For a long time IPv6 suffered from people running services over
tunnels via tunnel brokers, which resulted in horrible performance, MTU
issues, timeouts and so on. I have noticed recently that the situation has
improved a lot, with more and more "real", native deployments coming online.

~~~
tajen
Two weeks ago. But I would rather blamemyself for a lack of knowledge that the
VPS provider for providing OS images that don't fit my expectations.

------
wanderfowl
Interestingly, my iPhone 6 on Verizon's LTE in the US is running on IPV6.
Fascinating that my campus computer is behind the times, relative to my cell
phone.

~~~
teraflop
Android has actually been pretty far ahead of iOS in this respect. My Nexus 4
on T-Mobile has been running IPv6-only for close to two years now.

~~~
djrogers
Not really - iOS has been capable of this for a long time - the difference
noted in the article is due to iOS 9's change in _preference_ for IPv6.

Running an iPhone on IPv6 only far from new...

~~~
teraflop
Hmm. I don't own a modern iOS device myself, but my understanding was that the
kernel support has been there for a long time, but until iOS 9, IPv6 wasn't
actually enabled on cellular data networks. Upon investigating a bit more, it
looks like that may have only been true for T-Mobile. But it's hard to find
definitive statements one way or the other.

~~~
simon_vetter
iOS8 has been reported to be dual stacked (v6 + v4 addresses) on the cellular
side of things on Verizon and a bunch of other (mostly European) networks.

What Apple did with iOS9 is improve its address selection algorithm to prefer
ipv6 in a majority of cases (if both the device and the server are dual
stacked and unless v6 path latency is much greater than its v4 counterpart, v6
will be used).

In contrast, ios8 would prefer v4 over v6 when both endpoints were dual
stacked.

Also, from what I've seen, iOS devices won't provision ipv6 addresses on their
cellular interface unless their Carrier Profile says they should, so you might
have encountered devices not getting ipv6 addresses even though they were
connected to a dual stack network. Wifi always uses v6 if the network supports
it.

------
code_sterling
I'm amused by the timing, since the story above this is that ARIN has now run
out of IPv4 addresses.

------
facepalm
Alright, how can I make my server support it?

------
exabrial
IPv6 is good for anyone who want to identify individuals... NSA, FBI, Apple,
Google, advertisers, trackers, etc. So happy to see rapid adoption and my
fellow hacker news readers are excited about this too!

~~~
wyager
If your OS does proper address randomization, it's no more identifying than
ipv4.

~~~
exabrial
I don't see how that could possibly be true.

Even with privacy extensions, you can't "clear your cookies" start fresh with
another IP address. There is no incognito mode with IPv6. There is not
anonymous NAT.

It's no surprise to me that the companies pushing IPV6 the hardest are also
the ones most interested in your personal data.

~~~
feld
NAT provides no privacy. You're delusional.

~~~
acqq
Are you aware of this:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-
grade_NAT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT)

"Critics of carrier-grade NAT argue the following aspects:"

"It makes record keeping for law-enforcement operations more difficult, except
if the translation of the addresses is logged."

~~~
feld
With all of the metadata you're leaking onto the internet there are far better
ways to track you than by IP.

------
jmsmistral
WTF?! - "When Apple add or remove a port or protocol such as a floppy drive, a
disk drive or Adobe Flash support from its mainstream tech output, worlds
change" ... chill out.

------
jakobegger
This is a classic case of correlation vs. causation.

iOS 9 users are apparently more likely to use IPv6, but there is nothing in
the article or in the original blog post that supports the claim from the
headline that iOS 9 "drives IPv6 uptake". A more likely explanation is that
IPv6 is primarily used by tech savvy people, who are also more likely to
upgrade quickly to the newest version.

~~~
feld
iOS 9 includes an improved implementation of Happy Eyeballs which prefers IPv6
over IPv4 almost all the time. Same will happen with El Capitan.

[https://www.ietf.org/mail-
archive/web/v6ops/current/msg22455...](https://www.ietf.org/mail-
archive/web/v6ops/current/msg22455.html)

edit: I don't know why articles like this can't produce these sources to
validate the claims

~~~
jakobegger
Thanks for pointing to a source that actually explains what's happening. Now I
understand.

I read the original article and the cloud flare post, and it seemed that they
drew their conclusions from the pie charts; but in reality they just didn't
reveal their sources.

~~~
feld
I don't know why you were needlessly downvoted for drawing valid conclusions
from a story without any real sources. _sigh_

~~~
jakobegger
Maybe they downvoted my idea that early iOS updaters are more likely to have
working IPv6 stacks, which isn't really plausible on second thought.

