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posted by janrinok on Wednesday November 23 2016, @08:45AM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-faster dept.

[Editor's Note: This story is taken from information issued by Cloudflare and it refers to their experiences of IPv6. However, it remains a useful indicator on IPv6 availability and usage. Have a healthy pinch of salt to hand.]

It's 2016 and almost every site using Cloudflare (more than 4 million of them) is using IPv6. Because of this, Cloudflare sees significant IPv6 traffic globally where networks have enabled IPv6 to the consumer.

IPv6 is faster for two reasons. The first is that many major operating systems and browsers like iOS, MacOS, Chrome and Firefox impose anywhere from a 25ms to 300ms artificial delay on connections made over IPv4. The second is that some mobile networks won't need to perform extra v4 -> v6 and v6 -> v4 translations to connect visitors to IPv6 enabled sites if the phone is only assigned an IPv6 address. (IPv6-only phones are becoming very common. If you have a phone on T-Mobile, Telstra, SK Telecom, Orange, or EE UK, to name a few, it's likely you're v6-only.)

How much faster is IPv6? Our data shows that visitors connecting over IPv6 were able to connect and load pages in 27% less time than visitors connecting over IPv4. LinkedIn found an even more dramatic effect, with up to a 40% performance boost on mobile connections over IPv6. Facebook also found a significant performance increase, around 10-15% on IPv6.

IPv6 is clearly important for driving a faster, better internet, so who is driving IPv6 adoption?

In terms of countries, Belgium leads by a mile. Over the last 30 days, 56.47% of traffic (in bytes) to Belgians on Cloudflare has been over IPv6. This is largely due to Telenet, an ISP in Belgium, doing almost 96.8% of their traffic over IPv6!

The Irish numbers are artificially high due to several of Facebook's IPv6 ranges being registered in Ireland. Facebook does an enormous amount of traffic over IPv6 –– 81% of Facebook's traffic through Cloudflare is IPv6. In fact, Facebook's crawling over IPv6 actually accounts for 6.9% of Cloudflare's total outbound IPv6 traffic.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 23 2016, @04:52PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 23 2016, @04:52PM (#431912)

    As XML is to HTML. The work of a committee that got a head of steam and ran off the course.

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by bob_super on Wednesday November 23 2016, @05:31PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Wednesday November 23 2016, @05:31PM (#431954)

    Had v6 just been v4 with four times the address bits, the adoption rate would have been 100%, 10 years ago.
    Turns out that all those annoying v4 things that v6 tries to address, are not so important after all.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by digitalaudiorock on Wednesday November 23 2016, @07:21PM

      by digitalaudiorock (688) on Wednesday November 23 2016, @07:21PM (#432028) Journal

      Had v6 just been v4 with four times the address bits, the adoption rate would have been 100%, 10 years ago.

      +10000. Glad it's not just me. I confess that I've had very little experience as yet with v6, but every time I've read anything about those God-awful addresses, I just find myself asking "why??". It all seems to be a textbook case of over-engineering to me. Everywhere I turn these days there seems to be a "nothing simple can possibly be good" mindset, and worse yet, a massive attempt to address issues in the wrong places.

      The old Unix philosophy of "do one thing and do it well" couldn't possibly apply more when it comes to stuff like this. Why should an IP address try to do anything beyond uniquely identifying an address.

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by Dr Spin on Wednesday November 23 2016, @11:49PM

        by Dr Spin (5239) on Wednesday November 23 2016, @11:49PM (#432210)

        Why should an IP address try to do anything beyond uniquely identifying an address.

        Because most people were still using 8 bit computers when v6 was dreamed up. It was an attempt at
        enghineering the hell out of the pre-Pentium world.

        Unfortunately, Hell is an essential part of the Pentium world.

        --
        Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!