
Google’s IPv6 Stats Pass 3% Less Than 5 Months After Passing 2% - danyork
http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/blog/2014/02/googles-ipv6-stats-pass-3-less-than-5-months-after-passing-2/
======
eterm
It's interesting how seasonal this data is. There's a massive spike on weekend
traffic.

Is this because there's a lot less overall traffic on the weekend and the IPv6
part is fairly constant, or is there some other reason why IPv6 traffic should
spike* during the weekends?

*As a proportion. It jumps about 50 basis points on the weekend.

~~~
danyork
I was puzzled about this at first, but my guess is that the weekend spikes are
because people are going home and accessing Google's services from
_residential_ networks where many ISPs have started to roll out IPv6. Then on
Monday people go back to work where there may be less IPv6 access.

~~~
mentat
I concur with this speculation. My work access is all IPv4 but at home I'm
native IPv6 for my whole network.

------
AceJohnny2
Good, I hope the trend continues to accelerate.

That said, I recently had to disable IPv6 on my parent's ISP for bandwidth
reasons. They live in France and are served by Free[1], who enabled IPv6 a few
years ago. This christmas, I was surprised by their terrible bandwidth, which
was worse in the middle of Paris than something in a village in the alps! I
ultimitely traced it to the IPv6 option, though I didn't do deeper tracing to
find out why.

I suppose it's because many legacy backbone routers don't handle IPv6 at their
top capacity, as they have HW to accelerate IPv4 but not IPv6. See for example
the question "What is the difference between hardware and software IPv6
acceleration?" in this FAQ at Cisco: [2].

[1]: [http://www.free.fr](http://www.free.fr) [2]:
[http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/iosswrel/ps6537/p...](http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/iosswrel/ps6537/ps6553/prod_qas0900aecd803715bf.html)

~~~
mritun
HW acceleration won't matter at residential network speeds. It's mostly useful
for edge/core routers handling traffic in excess of million PPS.

~~~
ajb
A lot of home gateways have really feeble cpus and rely on HW acceleration to
process packets.

~~~
jrockway
Software on feeble CPUs does OK up to 100Mbps or so, and I doubt he's
complaining about problems at that speed.

(I have a 5+-year-old Geode-based router at home, and it can do full pf rule
evaluation and forwarding at about 300Mbps.)

------
oasisbob
I'm guessing that Google's new "Reduce Bandwidth Usage" setting is helping to
increase the IPv6 utilization metric. (It was released in January.) [1]

eg, with the setting enabled (Chrome/iPhone), [http://test-
ipv6.com](http://test-ipv6.com) shows a User Agent / v6 address corresponding
to Google's proxy farm.

[1] [https://developers.google.com/chrome/mobile/docs/data-
compre...](https://developers.google.com/chrome/mobile/docs/data-compression)

~~~
_delirium
Interesting, I didn't realize Chrome Mobile did that now. IIRC that was one of
the features of Opera Mobile that was somewhat unusual at the time.

~~~
cpeterso
Amazon's Kindle Fire browser (Silk) uses a similar data compression proxy
(using SPDY) through Amazon.

------
lelandbatey
I will say just from a user standpoint, ipv6 is amazing. I recently made the
switch to ipv6 on as many of my devices as possible purely because I can then
access all of them directly, no network finangling.

Since all my devices have publicly visible ipv6 addresses, I can access them
e.g.

    
    
        laptop.lelandbatey.com
        homedesktop.lelandbatey.com
        phone.lelandbatey.com
    
    

because I use tunnel brokers, sometimes the speeds not amazing, but the fact
that I can connect at all makes it awesome. Also, those example hostnames are
fake : )

~~~
lifeisstillgood
I do have to ask - what's a tunnel broker, aren't you worried about security
of those devices and - is it really that useful?

Edit - if it is really that useful, is it not instead the death of cloud
storage?

~~~
zaphoyd
Yes, it really is that useful. The ability to directly connect to machines on
my home network without mucking with VPNs, port forwarding, etc is fantastic.
The key thing it does is reduces friction when creating or using anything that
could be accessed from off the local network. The ability to assign static
addresses to custom DNS entries makes it even better. The more services that
throw up IPv6 support the more useful it gets. If I could pull from Github
over IPv6... or run SSL Labs TLS tests against an IPv6 VM...

In particular, it is better than other VPN/port forwarding type solutions
because it works transparently and universally. It works on your phone (where
VPN can be more tricky). It works in environments where you aren't allowed to
install special relay software. It works when you are a guest somewhere else
without them having to change their network setup.

As for cloud services... yes and no. In a world with direct addressing you
open up many opportunities for innovation in the home cloud appliance market.
However, many cloud services are made affordable because they can leverage
shared infrastructure, sell usage metadata, or add and remove capacity
instantly. Whether home based solutions could be competitive in price and
reliability without those abilities. I see some categories of service that it
makes sense for, others, less so.

Security is a concern, yes, but one that can and should be addressed by good
security tools and practices (firewalls, automatic security updates, good
backups, not running services you don't use, etc) not by crippling your
network with NAT.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
I guess I had become so used to NAT it just seemed the natural order of
things. I do think the security is still a major issue but then I like
building my servers as if they are alone on the Internet so it makes sense

And yes, a good point about the reliability of cloud services - but still at
50 bucks for 2 TB and iCloud costing me 20 bucks a month I think Shared
infrastructure savings have a long way to go !

~~~
zaphoyd
Large capacity media servers are something I think makes sense as a home
appliance. I also think that if people end up willing to put their money where
their mouths are that there will be a market for devices that provide cloud
like services with the privacy of local hardware.

Re: security. Cloud services aren't doing a lot better. They are repeatedly
broken into and have huge password lists stolen, many have governments have
direct programs for extracting datas from them, and someone else can call up
their customer support reps and practically ask for your password. Many
effective security best practices amount to obscurity (change ssh port
number). Large central services are very attractive and lucrative to hack.

------
IgorPartola
If you already have IPv6, check out this Chrome plugin (not mine, just a user)
that tells you which IP version you are using to access a site:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ipvfoo/ecanpcehffn...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ipvfoo/ecanpcehffngcegjmadlcijfolapggal).

~~~
danyork
There is also an "IPvFox" version for Firefox: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/ipvfox/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/ipvfox/)

I have this installed in both Chrome and Firefox and its great to see which
websites are available over IPv6 and which are not. (such as HN, sadly)

------
omni
And the award for most confusing headline goes to!

~~~
mojuba
Should've been _...pass 3% in less than 5 months..._

------
chimeracoder
I'm curious how much of this is due to mobile devices. For as long as I can
remember, I have had IPv6 addresses on both Verizon and T-Mobile (though only
T-mobile allows IPv6 traffic as of last year:
[http://www.extremetech.com/mobile/145765-ipv6-makes-
mobile-n...](http://www.extremetech.com/mobile/145765-ipv6-makes-mobile-
networks-faster))

~~~
danyork
I think mobile networks do play a good bit of a role here. My iPhone 5s is on
Verizon's LTE network and connects over IPv6 to sites. If you look at the
latest World IPv6 Launch measurements from Jan 16, you can see that 40% of the
traffic that was measured coming from Verizon Wireless' network was coming
over IPv6 -
[http://www.worldipv6launch.org/measurements/](http://www.worldipv6launch.org/measurements/)

(Those measurements show the % of IPv6 traffic from various operator networks
seen by Akamai, Facebook, Google and Yahoo.)

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

~~~
dublinben
It's too bad that page requires flash just to display a graph.

~~~
kseistrup
Sorry, I didn't notice. Flash ought to die.

~~~
dublinben
I notice it a lot more since I don't have Flash installed.

------
ScottWhigham
Wonder if the timing has anything to do with companies upgrading
networks/equipment over Christmas/New Year holidays? For the US at least, a
lot of workers take off significant amounts of time during then so it's often
a good time to upgrade or perform maintenance.

December 24: 2.57%. January 25th: 2.92 %

------
computer
So, do all your (startup's) domains have AAAA records yet, and servers IPv6? I
just enabled IPv6 on my stuff, which took much less work than expected.

~~~
SwellJoe
Oddly enough we don't, though we added full IPv6 support to our products
(which are management tools for hosting providers) years ago, and years before
any of our competitors. So, I feel kinda silly for not taking that to the next
step and actually enabling IPv6 for our own website. Gonna get on that problem
this week.

------
aroch
I'm happy to say my ~20 odd devices made the move to IPv6 this month

------
mikecb
I would not have expected US to be at 6.5%, though I suppose vzw helps a lot.

~~~
selectodude
Comcast, as well.

~~~
mikecb
Though for some reason they're going state by state.

------
IgorPartola
This is somewhat unrelated to the stats, but is related to IPv6: If you have
experienced issues with YouTube videos because your TelCo ISP is messing with
the routing, give an IPv6 tunnel a try. I have found that it works great and
my last two ISP's (TWC and Comcast) have not yet gone to the point of
deliberately slowing down IPv6 or YouTube over IPv6.

------
ihsw
It would be wonderful to see a contrast with non-human internet users -- I
seem to recall an article recently saying that bots now utilize more
port-80/port-443 bandwidth than humans do, and that the trend will only get
more skewed from now on.

~~~
innoying
That report was incorrect, but it would be interesting to see that data.

------
alimoeeny
Why ipV6 traffic is larger on weekends? see the graph by google, it is
periodic and if you zoom in peaks are on weekends

~~~
danyork
There's an earlier comment thread on this question:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7212411](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7212411)

Probably relates to people being at home accessing Google's services over
residential networks.

------
wtbob
Sadly, I downgraded my network from IPv5 to IPv4 this weekend, since I
couldn't quickly figure out how to get OpenWRT to hand out correct IPv6
addresses. Maybe I'll work on that again this weekend.

~~~
p1mrx
Make sure you're using a Barrier Breaker trunk build. The IPv6 address
management code has been completely overhauled since 12.09.

~~~
wtbob
Yeah, I'd hoped to go with stable, but I think this weekend I'll be moving to
Barrier Breaker.

------
Gracana
Hooray. All my servers have gobs of IPv6 addresses, but I've yet to get that
IPv6-y goodness in my home. I think that part is a long way off.

~~~
IgorPartola
Not as long as you think. Check out TunnelBroker.net and SixXS.

~~~
Gracana
Huhhhmmm. Interesting. I already have a linux WLAN gateway between my desktop
computer and my router, I guess I could set up the tunnel there and it would
be pretty much hassle-free. Thanks for the link.

~~~
IgorPartola
Yes. Depending on the type of tunnel and the provider you may have to put your
Linux gateway into the DMZ. The one type that does not require this is AYIYA
(Anything-in-Anything) from SixXS. Here it will be using putting IPv6 into
IPv4/UDP packets which traverse your NAT transparently.

All other tunnel types use IPv6-in-IPv4 directly, so they don't know anything
about the IPv4 NAT. This is called protocol 41 (the version number for 6in4,
see [http://www.iana.org/assignments/protocol-numbers/protocol-
nu...](http://www.iana.org/assignments/protocol-numbers/protocol-
numbers.xhtml)).

If you run into trouble, email me; my address is in the profile.

------
AznHisoka
It's all because someone decided to buy a ton of cheap 1c IPV6 proxies to
scrape Google's search results.

------
BorisMelnik
question: percentage-wise, how many addresses in the IPv6 scheme have we used
so far?

~~~
justincormack
0% near enough!

In reality it is more complex as the address space is split in two, the bottom
64 bits rarely has any density, only a few devices. End users get a /64 or a
/48 (or a few); a VPS will probably get a /64 by default.

~~~
TheCoelacanth
Even counting by percentage of /48 blocks allocated, it's still approximately
0%. There are roughly 40 thousand /48 blocks per person in the world.

~~~
BorisMelnik
Well that is reassuring. For a second there I thought I read that "3% of the
address space was used up" but I knew that couldn't be true. I remember
learning about IPV4 back in Computer Science class and having to learn subnets
and everything. This seems way more confusing!

------
motbob
I have no idea how facetious the author of this article is being.

~~~
dublinben
>Prior to that it had taken 11 months to go from 1% to 2%.

I don't think they're being facetious at all. The Internet Society cares about
things like this.

~~~
davewongillies
Then why did they have to start the article with "Oh GOD This is SO Boring.
Please Kill Me!"?

------
exabrial
IPv6 hater here... I'm armed with my asbestos underwear so flame away.

The best advice about IPv6 is to just disable it. IETF designed a terrible
protocol that doesn't even address the underlying major issue: routing table
size. Instead they just made it much worse.

You won't see me deploying IPV6 for another 20-30 years at least. Hoping it's
replaced by something actually usable by then.

~~~
lloeki
I've got native IPv6 at home and we enabled IPv6 on all services at work
(hosting web applications and services) and we have _zero_ issues. IPv6 solves
a staggering number of architecture problems for us compared to IPv4. For us
IPv6 is a net positive.

See? no flame.

~~~
ipv6curious
Could you please give some examples of the problems IPv6 solve for you?

~~~
zaphoyd
Marginal Cost. IPv4 addresses are expensive, IPv6 practically free.

Direct addressability. Removes the need for slow, expensive intermediaries
like NAT boxes and certain types of proxies by allowing security policies to
be applied independently of network addressing.

Simplified network planning. Enough address space to make an address layout
based on your actual needs rather than being forced to carve up your limited
v4 allocation in weird ways. You no longer have to guess what the right long
term size of your subnets are (they are always big enough) or worry about
putting unrelated machines on the same subnet because you are out of space for
new subnets.

