5% of Google's traffic is now IPv6

Digital Ocean supports IPv6 in their London DC. But if you just want a tunnel, it's much easier to get one from HE[1], or SixXS[2] than set up your own VPN. It's not anonymous though.

[1] Their London PoP is not accepting new users right now https://tunnelbroker.net/new_tunnel.php

[2] Two PoPs in London https://www.sixxs.net/pops/

Agreed. Comcast has terrible management, and unreliable (usually bad) customer support, but I've found that their network operations are very good (when they're not applying corporate anticompetitive policies); a couple of their top IPv6 people hang out on the Comcast forum on dslreports.com, and they really seem to care a lot about proper network management.

There are a few potential factors in play:

1. What kind of IPv6 connectivity do you have? If it's not a native deployment, it could be 6rd or 6to4. I believe that some applications/OSes will prefer IPv4 over non-native IPv6 when they have the choice, since the latter will be running through a proxy (and therefore will probably be slower).

2. It could be an OS setting. I think that most recent OSes will prefer IPv6 by default, but I could be mistaken.

3. Application settings could also be in play.

I installed a Chrome extension named "IPvFoo" that adds an indicator in the address bar to tell me whether I'm connecting over IPv4 or IPv6. When I'm at home (Comcast residential, native dual-stack), it shows me connecting over IPv6 a lot of the time, especially when I'm connected to larger sites; in fact, the majority of sites connect over IPv6 at least partially, since many popular services (Google Analytics, Google Fonts, some common CDNs for Javascript libraries) are available over v6.

Perhaps this will help you figure out what's going on: http://test-ipv6.comcast.net/

I spent some time checking into things, and here's what appears to be happening:

1. I do get an IPv6 address from Time-Warner... and it appears to be legit. (It's not the link-local address; it starts with 2605:e000, which is in the Time-Warner block)

2. But... it appears to be non-routable from the general internet. I think this is Time-Warner's fault. But maybe it's my router. I am not sure. Traceroute from http://4or6.com/traceroute?l=en gives me this. (I attempted to obfuscate my real address with XXXX)

    #traceroute 2605:e000:xxxx
    traceroute to 2605:e000:xxxx (2605:e000:xxxx), 30 hops max, 80 byte packets
     1  2607:f2f8:1600::1 (2607:f2f8:1600::1)  1.653 ms  1.597 ms  1.583 ms  
     2  2001:504:13::1a (2001:504:13::1a)  11.753 ms  11.746 ms  11.732 ms
     3  twcable-backbone-as7843.10gigabitethernet17.switch2.lax2.he.net (2001:470:0:2bf::2)  2.618 ms  2.610 ms  2.599 ms
     4  2001:1998:0:4::11d (2001:1998:0:4::11d)  3.956 ms 2001:1998:0:4::11b (2001:1998:0:4::11b)  3.477 ms 2001:1998:0:4::11d (2001:1998:0:4::11d)  5.512 ms
     5  2001:1998:0:8::83 (2001:1998:0:8::83)  4.090 ms  5.784 ms 2001:1998:0:8::87 (2001:1998:0:8::87)  6.542 ms
     6  2605:e000:0:4::41 (2605:e000:0:4::41)  6.753 ms  5.032 ms  5.011 ms
     7  2605:e000:0:4::5:7f (2605:e000:0:4::5:7f)  6.859 ms  7.042 ms  7.128 ms
     8  * * *

3. Since a recent firmware upgrade, my router detects this problem, and sometimes (but not always) decides to set up a 6to4 tunnel. I am not sure how this works, exactly.

4a. If the router does set up the 6to4 tunnel, I do have IPv6, but as organsnyder says, since 6to4 tunnels suck, the OS prefers to use ipv4.

4b. If the router does not set up the 6to4 tunnel, I have a completely non-functional IPv6.

Oh well, maybe next year.

I know.. this is what I face every day.

They hire managers and Directors who will do what the people above them say. The people above them have even less technical know-how, so it's not like they can vet potential candidates.