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IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark

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Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark

#321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a reason why adoption has been so abysmally slow? Like surely all the big players have updated their networking equipment by now, and surely every piece of enterprise-grade kit sold in the last 20 years has supported v6. The only arguments I've ever heard against ipv6 that made any sense are that: 1: it's hard to remember addresses, which is mayyyyybe valid for homelab enthusiast types, but for medium scale…

IPv6 is a recursive WTF. It might _look_ like a conservative expansion of IPv4, but it's really not. A lot of operational experience and practices from IPv4 don't apply to IPv6. For example, in IPv4 each host has one local net address, and the gateway uses NAT to let it speak with the Internet. Simple and clean. In IPv6 each host has multiple global addresses. But if your global connection goes down, these addresses…

> Then there's IP fragmentation and PMTU that are a burning trash fire.

It's not significantly worse on v6 compared to v4. Yes, in theory, you can send v4 packets without DF and helpful routers will fragment for you. In practice, nobody wants that: end points don't like reassembling and may drop fragments; routers have limited cpu budget off the fast path and segment too big is off the fast path, so too big may be dropped rather than be fragmented and with DF, an ICMP may not always be sent, and some routers are configured in ways where they can't ever send an ICMP.

PMTUd blackholes suck just as much on v4 and v6. 6rd tunnels maybe make it a bit easier to hit if you advertise mtu 1500 and are really mtu 1480 because of a tunnel, but there's plenty of derpy networks out there for v4 as well.

Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark

#322
post #23

It's only a matter of time before laptops get 5G. Macbooks have been rumoured for a while to get cellular modems. [1] This will probably help adoption. On the one hand it will generate more IPv6 traffic. On the other hand it will expose more developers to IPv6; which will expose them to any lack of support for IPv6 within their own products. [1]: https://9to5mac.com/2025/08/14/apples-first-mac-with-5g-cell...

> It's only a matter of time before laptops get 5G.

So you want laptops to cost plus a measly 19.99/month for internet connectivity?

What's wrong with just tethering to my existing phone?

Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark

#323
post #13

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

Same with Twilio. We have an internal server that does system alerts. We recently moved it to an IPv6 only host, and a few weeks went by and noticed there were no longer receiving alerts.

Turns out we could not connect to Twilio's API which is IPv4 only.

Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Outdated beliefs probably. When I talk about v6 support in our b2b saas, PM laughs and says nobody uses that shit. Big tech are massive laggards on this funnily enough.

Well it’s over 50%…

Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark

#325
post #44
post #23

It's only a matter of time before laptops get 5G. Macbooks have been rumoured for a while to get cellular modems. [1] This will probably help adoption. On the one hand it will generate more IPv6 traffic. On the other hand it will expose more developers to IPv6; which will expose them to any lack of support for IPv6 within their own products. [1]: https://9to5mac.com/2025/08/14/apples-first-mac-with-5g-cell...

I can't imagine a worse privacy nightmare. Always on backdoored baseband in 5G with a unique permanent IPv6 address assigned to the machine. Okay, maybe it could be worse if each user account is assigned its own unique IPv6 perma-cookie.

> Okay, maybe it could be worse if each user account is assigned its own unique IPv6 perma-cookie.

They will. One from facebook, one from google, one from tiktok, several from Palantir and its partners...

Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark

#326

As a French national, I am surprised to discover we are topping the charts according to this analysis. Does anybody know why that might be the case? What's the story of IPv6 deployment in France?

I'm wondering the same thing for India. Not the top but looks surprisingly surprisingly high. Perhaps I'm reading the data wrong.

India has about 1.5 billion people, and has only recently been getting most of them online. Less IPv4 legacy, and it has always been obvious that IPv4 was never going to be ‘enough’ to actually onboard everyone anyway.

When I lived in India, everything had IPv6 out of the box.

Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark

#327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never checked. But it does change once in a while. The router has a dyndns function which updates a DNS entry, but only for the router itself. But this is sufficient for the NAT port forwarding.

Ok, so most of the time you are trackable by your public IPv4. The situation is not much better.

Let's say when your ipv6 prefix changes it is almost the same situation. Only that ipv4 bundles all traffic of all devices on one ip which obfuscates a bit.

But having the ipv6 prefix change you get a pile of problems (DNS, firewall), you don't have with ipv4.

Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark

#328
What I have asked myself the last few months: I've read about IPv4 becoming sparce a few years ago. I haven't read much about it lately. And I've thought maybe the advance of cloud computing and load balancer kind of mitigated the issue of sparce IP4?

Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark

#329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outdated beliefs probably. When I talk about v6 support in our b2b saas, PM laughs and says nobody uses that shit. Big tech are massive laggards on this funnily enough.

It's because big tech is USA based mostly, where there's still a glut of ipv4 available.

Where can I get it, asking for a friend?

Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark

#330
post #244
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple/iOS is probably one of the biggest individual drivers of IPv6 adoption. They've been requiring that iOS apps work on IPv6-only networks for close to 10 years now

The requirement is to support IPv6 only networks with IPv4 transition mechanisms. It does not preclude contacting v4-only servers.

And the higher level libraries mostly do it for you, too, even if you directly specify IPv4 addresses in your code (due to NAT64 [1]). I think it only even requires special work from you as a developer if you're using low-level or non-standard libraries.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAT64

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