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IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark

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Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark

#141
post #101
post #96

It amuses me to see that according to the map, France is best in class or close to be, while just a few weeks ago, my ISP in France stopped providing me IPv6 connectivity… The story is that at the beginning I had IPv6, and a shared dynamic IPv4 behind a CGNAT, I asked for a rollback to a full duplex static IPv4 and for three years I had both a static personal IPv4 and an IPv6. A few weeks ago my router went down and…

Are you with SFR? I also seem to only have a static IPv4 (I don't pay for it, but it's never changed in the lifetime of the connection). I asked for an IPv6 but they said it was not possible/difficult.

Yep, with "RED by SFR" specifically.

Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark

#142
Meanwhile: one of the major mobile network in my country announced cisco collab/ipv6 ~5 years ago, but still doesn't provide v6, just v4 CGNAT.

Personal web server running dual stack since early 2010s currently sees 18-20% v6 traffic. When split by type, counting only mobile users it reaches 30% at peak.

Bot/crawler traffic is ironically 100% v4.

Meanwhile: enabled h3 in september last year for the fun of it, instantly at >40% traffic by request count, passing 50% since the beginning of the year, h2 accounting almost all the remaining traffic and plain ssl/http requests <1% being just bots.

Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark

#143
If GitHub flipped a switch and enabled IPv6 it would instantly break many of their customers who have configured IP based access controls [1]. If the customer's network supports IPv6, the traffic would switch, and if they haven't added their IPv6 addresses to the policy ... boom everything breaks.

This is a tricky problem; providers don't have an easy way to correlate addresses or update policies pro-actively. And customers hate it when things suddenly break no matter how well you go about it.

[1] https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-cloud@latest/organizat...

Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark

#144

Tailscale have a great FAQ about IPv4 vs IPv6: https://tailscale.com/docs/reference/faq/ipv6 If you're not an expert in this area it's worth a read - I certainly learned a few things!

"IPv6 is the next generation of the Internet Protocol (IP), the successor to IPv4."

This is a misconception. It is not the successor to IPv4, it is an alternative. Maybe the alternative is so good it will eventually make the older extinct, but it does not look like that

Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark

#145
post #49
post #5

It has barely hit 50% and it's already plateauing. This adoption rate is ridiculous despite basically all network interfaces supporting it. I thought I would see IPv6 take over in my lifetime as the default for platforms to build on but I can see I was wrong. Enterprise and commercial companies are literally going to hold back internet progress around 60 to 75 years because it's in their best interest to ensure users…

I think we'll hit a tipping point soon, just like with Python3 - for years and years it seemed almost stalled, then it became easier to start with python3 than python2 and suddenly everyone migrated.

“Gradually, then suddenly.”

Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark

#146
post #118

IPv6 will never make it. Maybe IPv8 [0], which IPv6 should have actually looked like: > 1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1 [0] https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-thain-ipv8-00.html

Nice idea. Always wondered why IPv6 went so ambitious with the addressing

Might as well go big. 24 extra bytes per packet is not that big deal. And having that much extra space means you can screw up design multiple times and still be able to reuse lot of infra. Also getting rid of idea that you are even trying to manually manage the address space eases many things.

Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark

#147
post #13

And still, in the year of our lord 2026, GitHub does not support IPv6. https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/10539

Do we know any technical reason for this? Or are we left to think this is somehow a political thing?

Perhaps a little tin foil hatty and definitely not the only reason but Microsoft owns Github and also makes a boatload of money off of Azure. Incumbent cloud providers like Azure have a major advantage in terms of having plenty of IPv4 addressing available whereas a new entrant to that market would have to buy or lease that space at a premium. Thus, these companies have an incentive to keep IPv4 a necessity.

Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark

#148

One of the foremost obstacles to wide adoption is that IPv4 still works great and it's ubiquitous. There is no advantage or up-side to deprecating or abandoning IPv4 support at all. The only result of disabling IPv4 is a denial of service to a certain sector of customers or clients. The only way this will change is by increasing pressure on the resource of IPv4 networks. It was a few years ago that AWS broke the news…

Maybe it's time to tax IPv4 usages or holders.

Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark

#149
Zoom in on that graph using the controls at the bottom, and you'll see a repeating pattern of crests and troughs, weekly. There's about a 5% difference between the crests and the troughs: the crests are hitting the 50% line or just below it, and the troughs are down around 45%.

The real question is, why are the crests so predictable? They're always on Saturdays; Sunday dips down a little below the crest, then Monday-Friday is down in the 45% range before the next Saturday jumps up to 50% again. (Fridays usually have a small rise, up to the 46-47% area).

My theory: mobile access rises on weekends. People are more often accessing Google services from their work computers Monday-Friday, but on Saturdays and Sundays most (not all) people are away from the office. Many of them will end up using smartphones rather than laptops for Internet access, for various reasons such as being outdoors. And since smartphones are nearly all using IPv6 these days, that means an uptick in IPv6 usage over the weekends.

Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark

#150
post #149

Zoom in on that graph using the controls at the bottom, and you'll see a repeating pattern of crests and troughs, weekly. There's about a 5% difference between the crests and the troughs: the crests are hitting the 50% line or just below it, and the troughs are down around 45%. The real question is, why are the crests so predictable? They're always on Saturdays; Sunday dips down a little below the crest, then Monday-…

It's not just mobile networking but residential ISPs in general have better IPv6 support. In the US, Comcast was one of the first big IPv6 deployments, in Europe CGNAT+IPv6 is common in many places.

Meanwhile corporate IT for business and education networks have less incentive to upgrade and typically lag behind in adoption in general.

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