After Launch Day: Taking Stock of IPv6 Adoption

darthcamaro writes "So how did World IPv6 Launch go? Surprisingly well, according to participants at the event. Google said it has seen 150% growth in IPv6 traffic, Facebook now has 27 million IPv6 users and Akamai is serving 100x more IPv6 traffic. But it's still a 'brocolli' technology. 'I've said in the past that IPv6 is a 'broccoli' technology,' Leslie Daigle, CTO of the Internet Society said. 'I still think it is a tech everybody knows it would be good if we ate more of it but nobody wants to eat it without the cheese sauce.'" Reader SmartAboutThings adds a few data points: "According to Google statistics, Romania leads the way with a 6.55% adoption rate, followed by France with 4.67%. Japan is on the third place so far with 1.57% but it seems here 'users still experience significant reliability or latency issues connecting to IPv6-enabled websites.' In the U.S. and China the users have noticed infrequent issues connecting to the new protocol, but still the adoption rate is 0.93% and 0.58%, respectively."

Network gear features are still WAY behind v4

[BagOBones]

On the consumer front only just recently did home WiFi routers start shipping or start getting IPv6 support, even then finding an ISP that will provision you is next to impossible.

On the enterprise front gear has been labeled as IPv6 ready or compatible or even listed it as a feature for a long time. However if you work in security and have to implement policy control over content, you quickly see that the functionality is years behind when applied to IPv6 flows... At an enterprise level switching isn't easy without swamping out a lot of gear, or reducing expectations... IPv6 enabled deep inspection, and application layer inspection tools are only now becoming available, or only now becoming mature enough to roll out.

Re:Network gear features are still WAY behind v4

[imemyself]

I definitely agree with the concerns about IPv6 in the enterprise. Sure, almost everything has had some IPv6 support for years, but the feature parity with IPv4 was not there. (For example maybe something supports OSPF / BGP with IPv4 but only static routes with IPv6...or you can reference address groups from within a IPv4 ACL but not from IPv6). Even today some vendors (*cough* Juniper on their EX switches *cough*) see IPv6 routing as "extra" feature that isn't available on the basic license level. This is unacceptable, and shows a complete disconnect between vendors and enterprises / service providers with respect to what's actually needed for real world IPv6 deployments.

Re:IPV6 is BROCCOLI!?

[I_am_Jack]

Blanch it, which is to say boil it for no longer three minutes. The general rule about steaming versus blanching is if it grows below the ground, steam it; if it grows above the ground, blanch or braise it. And no, boiling doesn't remove any more nutrients than steaming does. /off topic.

I Tried Anyway...

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought a business connection from my local provider, asked my salesperson if they had IPv6, they said yes. Tried to set it up for World IPv6 day. Well, their tech support says no they do not have IPv6. So, that was my IPv6 day experience.

Re:Privacy Concerns

[SuricouRaven]

Not quite. Your ISP still assigns you a /64 (typically) so all your requests would have to come from within that - and the other end could easily recognize this. The only real privacy implication of ipv6 is that it'd be possible for a server to tell via IP address which computer in a household a request came from, rather than just the house - so it could make different profiles for the teenage daughter to see lots of clothes and music ads while the mother gets lots of furniture and household products advertising. But even without ipv6, this is trivial anyway - it just needs to be done by cookies, which is how every major profile-building ad network does it already.

Re:IPV6 is BROCCOLI!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is an example Carotenoid bioavailability is higher from salads ingested with full-fat than with fat-reduced salad dressings as measured with electrochemical detection [ajcn.org]. It is basically accepted lore in the field that fat is required to absorb fat-soluble nutrients (if there were no fats, all the hydrophobic molecules would cluster together into unabsorbabably large clumps; with fats they would dissolve into them, which can then be absorbed in the intestines).

Also with enterprise gear

[Sycraft-fu]

There can be a real difference between "Can do IPv6" and "Can do IPv6 with realistic traffic." Most high end Cisco gear, even older stuff could be updated to support IPv6. However the problem is that it is all in software, all on the rather small CPU. So sure it'll work if you have only a couple IPv6 flows, however if everything went IPv6 it'd fall over. You need support in the ASICs for it, and that means buying new hardware.

Of course being high end it isn't so cheap. We upgraded all our stuff on campus to do IPv6 and it was millions to get all the hardware needed. Now we are large, but not compared to many ISPs. So it isn't so easy to just say "Oh buy a bunch of new equipment to replace the perfectly good stuff you already have."

IPv6 is coming, slowly, but it isn't going to be a fast process and anyone who things people, ISPs, etc should "Just do it," hasn't spent any real time looking at what is involved.

Re:Privacy Concerns

[icebraining]

IPv6 most certainly does NAT: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6296 [ietf.org]

Re:IPV6 is BROCCOLI!?

[osvenskan]

Can't say I've ever had kale. I enjoy collard greens, does that count?

Amazingly enough (getting way OT now), broccoli, kale, collard greens, cauliflower and cabbage are all the same species. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Brassica oleracea [wikipedia.org].

I've been using native IPv6 for well over a year

[tdelaney]

My ISP (Internode [on.net]) has been providing opt-in dual-stack support for at least a couple of years, and enabled it by default for all new customers in January. Internode currently have about 2% of their customer base on IPv6.

Note: if you go to that page and the logo is spinning, it means you've connected via IPv6.

I get a static /56 prefix (earlier when it was still considered a trial they gave a /64 that could change when you lost ADSL connection). My router (Billion 7800N) acts as a DHCPv6 server and everything is hunkey-dory except for one minor quibble - the router advertises the upstream DNSv6 servers instead of itself, so if you've done static MAC->IPv4 mapping in the router they won't be returned when a DNSv6 request is made. The fix there is to manually set the link-local address of the router as the DNSv6 server on each of the machines.