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Google Hits 50% IPv6

blog.apnic.net

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Re: Google Hits 50% IPv6

#61
post #36

Google hits 50% IPv6, very good for accessing websites. But my TP-Link router blocks by default inbound IPv6 connections, without any option to configure it, still bad for pure IPv6 bidirectional streaming, gaming or services on home networks.

All these systems are a reflection of the time that they were designed. IPv6 is 30 years old. At that time a lot of threats just didn't exist. One of my favorite is the decision to default to /64 blocks. There was a time when the designers believed that you'd use your 48 bit MAC address as part of this. Now we know that's a PII nightmare and nobody does it. Yet we're still stuck with the 128 bit addresses that came f…

> Now we know that's a PII nightmare and nobody does it. Yet we're still stuck with the 128 bit addresses that came from that.

Randomizing the local address doesn't mean it isn't useful. You can't scan a /64 so that's already a major improvement. The fact that randomly selecting a number is effectively never going to collide greatly simplifies automatic network configuration.

The major issue is that the /64 isn't mandatory from a technical perspective. Being merely a subset of the larger address it's nothing more than a convention. In the end not all providers make it available to you even though supposedly they ought to.

If we're going to complain about anything it should be the godawful notation that so easily breaks parsers. Or the fact that the width is massively excessive which creates a usability nightmare due to normal humans not being able to readily recall 128 bit numbers (let alone how long it takes to type them in).

Re: Google Hits 50% IPv6

#62
post #36

Google hits 50% IPv6, very good for accessing websites. But my TP-Link router blocks by default inbound IPv6 connections, without any option to configure it, still bad for pure IPv6 bidirectional streaming, gaming or services on home networks.

All these systems are a reflection of the time that they were designed. IPv6 is 30 years old. At that time a lot of threats just didn't exist. One of my favorite is the decision to default to /64 blocks. There was a time when the designers believed that you'd use your 48 bit MAC address as part of this. Now we know that's a PII nightmare and nobody does it. Yet we're still stuck with the 128 bit addresses that came f…

> There was a time when the designers believed that you'd use your 48 bit MAC address as part of this. Now we know that's a PII nightmare and nobody does it.

Nobody includes their MAC address in their public IPv6 addresses anymore, but every IPv6 setup that I've seen still gives every device a unique globally-routable IPv6 address, with no NAT at all.

> One of my favorite is the decision to default to /64 blocks.

The nice thing is that a /64 is big enough that clients can just randomly pick any address, and it will almost certainly be available, meaning that you don't need DHCP. This is actually widely implemented, and is known as SLAAC [0].

> Yet we're still stuck with the 128 bit addresses that came from that.

The extra address space only adds 16 bytes to every packet, and it ensures that we will never run out of addresses like we did with IPv4.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#Stateless_address_autocon...

Re: Google Hits 50% IPv6

#63

Google hits 50% IPv6, very good for accessing websites. But my TP-Link router blocks by default inbound IPv6 connections, without any option to configure it, still bad for pure IPv6 bidirectional streaming, gaming or services on home networks.

Put OpenWRT on the thing and you'll be able to do what you want. Experience the joy of adding not port forwarding rules for IPv4 but more or less identical (same ports) access rules for IPv6.

Re: Google Hits 50% IPv6

#64
post #24

I made my homepage (www.makonea.com) support IPv6 too, but the number of people actually using it is much smaller than I expected. Is IPv6 really that widely used? I'm supporting both because I heard it's good to support both, but I'm not sure what the actual benefit is. Sometimes, when behind Cloudflare, I think even if someone connects via IPv6, it ends up coming through as IPv4

> Is IPv6 really that widely used? Mobile carriers use it almost exclusively, which is already a huge chunk of the internet, and newer ISPs are switching to it too. > I'm supporting both because I heard it's good to support both, but I'm not sure what the actual benefit is. The benefit is that you allow IPv4-only and IPv6-only clients to connect.

I accidentally became the user of an IPv6-only device a while back for some obscure reason I never could figure out. Let me tell you: There are no IPv6-only users. Absolutely nothing except Google, Facebook, and YouTube works. Any website not in the top 20 are IPv4-only. It was so bad I briefly thought I didn't have an internet connection at all. Anyone stuck on an IPv6-only connection would immediately cancel their contract on the grounds that they don't have de-facto internet access.

Re: Google Hits 50% IPv6

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something is very wrong with your network then. I never needed to disable IPv6. Maybe you should question it.

Fair enough. I do question it often. It's a standard Asus router but it's given me a lot of ire. I hate to say it but it's never a problem when I install windows on the same machines (I'm currently in the process of trying to completely remove windows from my life)

Similar experience. I bought an ASUS router and enabled IPv6. It slowed down everything down. Immediately flashed OpenWrt on it, IPv6 works like charm.

It's usually bad configuration done by the router vendors. It doesn't mean IPv6 is bad.

Re: Google Hits 50% IPv6

#66
post #46

Interesting to see the per-country rates[1]. France is up to 85%, apparently! [1] https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...

The more mobile traffic, the more IPv6. Have a look at India, it is not as if everyone has a fibre connection running IPv6.

Well, France has 99% IPv6 deployment through both mobile and landline these days

https://www.arcep.fr/fileadmin/reprise/observatoire/ipv6/Arc...

(2025, from 2024 data)

Reason that Google isn't seeing more is a) some BigCo v4 holdouts b) happy eyeballs sometimes landing on v4 because their v6 is shitty 6rd or something (e.g Free SAS)

Re: Google Hits 50% IPv6

#67
post #24

I made my homepage (www.makonea.com) support IPv6 too, but the number of people actually using it is much smaller than I expected. Is IPv6 really that widely used? I'm supporting both because I heard it's good to support both, but I'm not sure what the actual benefit is. Sometimes, when behind Cloudflare, I think even if someone connects via IPv6, it ends up coming through as IPv4

When hosting a server IPv6 doesn't make a huge difference beyond your logs will probably be a bit more accurate, people behind CGNAT where an ISP has multiple customers sharing a block of IPv4 will show up with their actual IPv6 address. They'll maybe also find it slightly quicker because they're not being funnelled through NAT gateways but realistically not enough to notice. From the user side IPv6 is great for me.…

Thank you for the advice. By any chance, have you worked with Ruby before? I remember seeing your username back when Ruby was popular and I first started learning it in university

Re: Google Hits 50% IPv6

#68
Cloudflare sees over 40%, and it hasn't gone up in the last year even with the overall traffic increase. Personally, as the APNIC article also says about their own observations, I guess the overall adoption is somewhere in between.

https://radar.cloudflare.com/adoption-and-usage#ipv4-vs-ipv6

But we have to remember that this reflects the adoption on the client side. With many high profile services still IPv4-only, the fraction of IPv6 flowing on the public Internet might be much lower.

I wonder what incentives are needed to push this forward, because it's not the same incentives as years ago for sure. We've long since exhausted new IPv4 allocations.

Re: Google Hits 50% IPv6

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For client server web browsing what's the downside of CGNAT? I'd understand if we were talking about self hosting a service from home but for typical consumer usage?

1. Peer-to-peer networking won't usually work correctly. And quite a bit of software uses P2P networking these days---BitTorrent, Zoom/Teams (via WebRTC), Tailscale, PlayStation/Xbox multiplayer, etc. Most of these services have automatic fallbacks when P2P networking doesn't work, but these fallbacks are usually slower and less reliable. 2. Most websites assume that 1 IPv4 address==1 household, so you'll often run i…

While true, neither of those are relevant in context (and I even explicitly acknowledged your first bullet in my comment above). It was suggested that a website operator deploying IPv6 would somehow improve the end user experience by virtue of avoiding CGNAT and I was questioning that. I do of course appreciate that going via CGNAT to a clueless operator that eagerly adds IPv4 bans can be problematic but that's more a question of why you as a consumer might want IPv6 connectivity not why a service provider would want to deploy it.

Re: Google Hits 50% IPv6

#70

I’ve yet to live anywhere where the available mainstream ISPs were willing or able to provide IPv6 service. I’d be happy to use it, if I were able. I also have built cloud infrastructure for multiple SaaS providers with tens of thousands of customers over the past decade. Only one customer I’m aware of has ever even requested IPv6 support. And if customers aren’t asking for it, my employers have never been interested…

I'm interested, apart from the chicken egg problem, what are things that you found bad about IPv6. What do you think is overengineered?

I personally found that the features I interacted with were useful (SLAAC, address size, router advertisements, ...) and the changes made it cleaner (removal of broadcast for multicast, removal of fragmentation fields, ...).

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