
Google's IPv6 Statistics - bensummers
http://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics/
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lenni
That is depressing, isn't it?

On the other hand, I'm still wondering why Google hasn't switched away from
the Flash-based graphing tool seen Analytics and Finance.

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pedrokost
Has anyone had any issues with it? I think it is very robust and integrates so
seamlessly one doesn't notice it's Flash unless you have Flash disabled. This
is one of the 'appropriate and well implemented' Flash products. It's not
broken in any way, so why fix it?

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navyrain
I know I've disabled flash myself; my browsing experience is more often hurt
by flash than it is helped, so it is a net gain.

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zaphar
There are times when I wonder if we will ever actually switch over to IPv6.
The rate of adoption is super slow and yet at some point surely we'll hit some
sort of critical mass right?

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SystemOut
Hurricane Electric has a nice little widget that shows how many IPv4 addresses
are left for allocation.

The site is <http://ipv6.he.net/>

I was reading somewhere that there are still a pretty decent number of
allocated but unused addresses available out there that will still need to be
used but that can't go on forever.

It's hard to say what will actually happen when we do start to run short,
though. I doubt it will have any noticeable impact on the average consumer,
though.

~~~
bigfudge
I find these examples of scarcity and cost really interesting and wonder if
economists do too... IP4 is like a miniature version of the energy crisis — at
some point the cost of not switching _to someone_ become greater than those of
switching. I'd be interested to know how it works in this situation? Who will
be, in actuality, faced with the headache of not enough addresses, and will
they be sufficiently powerful to motivate others who don't directly experience
the pain to transition?

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troymc
I wonder why there's a spike every Monday?

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jjcm
Unless the graph changed, the spikes are showing up on Sundays on my end. My
guess is simply from weekend use - people going home and using their ipv6
connected computers, then using their ipv4 work computers during the week.

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mike-cardwell
Are there actually any residential ISPs that do native IPv6? I'd switch in a
heart beat if there were...

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nl
Where do you live?

My ISP does[1]. It's not trivial to switch over though - for example, most
home ADSL devices won't support it[2].

[1] <http://ipv6.internode.on.net/>

[2] <http://ipv6.internode.on.net/access/adsl/>

~~~
mike-cardwell
I should have mentioned. I'm in the UK. The East Midlands to be precise.

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InclinedPlane
Here's the problem, I only ever hear about the advantages of IPv6 in terms of
its much larger address space, and thus as a solution to the limited address
space of IPv4. If the only reason to expend all the effort necessary to move
away from IPv4 merely to avoid the problem of running out of addresses then of
course it's going to be a slow process, and may not be started in earnest
until there's really a crisis.

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nl
This article is worth reading:
[http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/09/there-is-no-
pla...](http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/09/there-is-no-plan-b-why-
the-ipv4-to-ipv6-transition-will-be-ugly.ars)

It explains things like why having a IPv6 capable computer doesn't solve the
problem, why we can't just use the class A address space etc etc.

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beaumartinez
Over 99.7% of hosts hitting Google.com are _IPv4 only_. That's _insane_! Some
estimates say that IPv4 addresses will run out _in under a year_. And still
under 0.3% of all hosts have IPv6 capability. Long live ISP-side NAT.

However, I think the reason for this is obvious. Had IPv6 not been designed as
forcefully backwards-incompatible...

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cosmicray
> Over 99.7% of hosts hitting Google.com are IPv4 only.

Is it the hosts, or is it the mid-span links ? I'm sitting here in a fast-food
place with a Macbook is certainly IPv6 capable, but I suspect the cable-modem
and/or the AP they use here isn't. How many last mile providers are IPv6
capable today ?

~~~
ismarc
Your computer being IPv6 compatible is incidental to the actual transition to
IPv6. IPv4 to IPv6 NAT will be used as the circuit that's provided has IPv6
only connectivity in order to support older clients. And then, in order to
talk to any hosts that don't have IPv6 support (a large number of them, as in,
insanely large number), you'll need an IPv6 to IPv4 bridge (provided by the
ISP, transparent to the end user). If done properly, hosts that support IPv6
will start getting traffic as the onsite CPEs and gateways start getting IPv6
addresses rolled out to them (likely to be starting on date X new customers
get IPv6 IPs and existing customers maintain IPv4 for the transition period).

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maxklein
So what about all the organisations that were assigned class A address blocks?
Should they not do something and give up these classes, come 2011? We
certainly don't have 2^32 devices out there.

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zokier
Because I hate downvoting without explanation: This question arises every time
when exhaustion of IPv4 is discussed.

Reallocating class A blocks would only delay the inevitable by few months
(less than a year for sure).

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maxklein
Are 50% of all IPv4 addresses not class A? Can you explain a bit more in-depth
why it would not make a significant difference?

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wmf
Talking about "class A" is a red herring. There are used addresses and unused
addresses. It's not clear how many allocated-but-unused addresses exist
because the audits necessary to find them would be expensive, but people have
made estimates and those estimates are not that large. At any rate, the
transfer market should flush out some of these "dark" addresses once they are
needed.

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zokier
I wonder how they collect this data. Maybe by having a list of IPv6 capable
ISPs

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wmf
The typical way to do this is to include a 1x1 pixel image from an IPv6-only
server, and use JS to detect whether it loads or not.

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ecaradec
Can't we just make a backward compatible IPV6 bis, move on and forget this
fiasco ?

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wmf
No. Even if some new protocol was _finalized_ today, it couldn't be widely
deployed until 2015, which is after the end of the world. Also, there's no way
to create a protocol which has larger addresses and is completely backwards-
compatible; IPv6+NAT64+DNS64 already exists and is as backwards-compatible as
you're going to get.

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ecaradec
To the rate at ipv6 is installing we are still nowhere today, we have been
there for more than 5 years, and we could still be there 5 years from now. I
have read several times that it ipv6 had been designed non backward
compatible, so I suppose there was a backward compatible way to design it. It
seems that it would be possible to use 0 0 0 0 prefix as a special case for
ipv6 and truncate it for ipv4.

I suppose there is a reason that prevent that because this is way too much of
an evidence, so someone certainly has though about it : what's prevent us to
do that ?

