Comment by zaphoyd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zaphoyd | Hacker News Reader

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From what I can gather the traffic figures reported by the ipv6 launch site (25% for Verizon Wireless) are traffic in/out of the various ASNs listed. So it is in fact 25% of Verizon Wireless's customer traffic is over IPv6 to IPv6 enabled content.

This is actually not as strange as it might seem. Google/Bing/Facebook/Youtube/Netflix/Wikipedia and the iTunes store are all available over IPv6. These properties represent a significant portion of typical mobile device traffic. That 11% of the remaining Alexa top 1000 properties are IPv6 enabled doesn't hurt either. Lastly, practically 100% of VZW's LTE customers are using handsets and operating systems that support IPv6 so they don't have the issues Comcast has with ancient home routers and modems stopping people from using the v6 service that is provided.

Thanks for clarifying this! So this 25% really is consumer traffic, and Verizon is so high because they default to preferring IPv6 servers when available? That's great news for IPv6 adoption. It's also consistent with what's reported later in the article, about IPv6 prevalence at various other installations.

"defaulting" to IPv6 is something that is done on the DNS/client end. Verizon is so high because they have a brand new network that was built from the ground up with mandatory IPv6 support for all devices required. See the presentation notes that ejdyksen posted above for more information.

For mobile networks IPv6 has a better business case than most networks. Mobile networks are new enough that they don't typically have large blocks of addresses ready to use so every IPv6 packet is one that doesn't take resources on your expensive CGN gear. T-mobile's wireless network is also fully IPv6 enabled.

As zaphoyd said, Verizon doesn't default to IPv6. Dual-stack devices should be using the Happy Eyeballs [1,2] algorithm to choose whether to use IPv4 or IPv6.

[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6555

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Eyeballs

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