US Has More IPv6 Eyeballs Than Asia, Because of Apple

An anonymous reader writes "Google has been checking to see who's using IPv6. According to the company's tracking, half of all IPv6-capable systems seen by Google are Macs, helping the US land in fifth place in percentage of IPv6 users world wide, ahead of China and Japan."

Comments

Linux much

[Enderandrew]

Apple has a far greater market share than Linux desktops, but you can't completely ignore that Linux has been pushing IPv6 for some time.

Re:Linux much

[RalphBNumbers]

This isn't just a matter of Mac vs Linux desktop market share.
Google's numbers say that the following percentages of users are IPv6 capable, broken down by OS:
2.44% for Mac OS
0.93% for Linux
0.32% for Vista

The article I saw on this at Ars Technica attributed this difference(despite the fact that all three OSes are IPv6 capable by default) to the fact that mac users have a tendency to use other Apple hardware, and Apple's Airport routers use 6to4 to tunnel IPv6 by default.

If linux has been pushing ipv6 (what does that even mean? does your kernel complain when it has to handle ipv4 packets?), perhaps it's been pushing in the wrong place, i.e. on the desktop, or as an end to end solution, rather than in routers, and with tunneling.

Re:False negatives abound

[Spy der Mann]

However, my Linksys NATing router is not.

Exactly. I feel like left out - what use is having an IPv6 capable machine, if my ISP blocks all my IPv6 traffic simply because they don't support it?

Re:False negatives abound

[Anonymous Coward]

ISPs don't like IPv6 as it "flattens" the internet. NAT is good for them, keeps clients clients and servers servers, also makes it easy to install what are really shaping / deep packet inspection / logging black boxes as "NAT" appliances, etc.

Re:This result seems to be because of Apple router

[Dolda2000]

Many Mac users, instead of using some 'generic' WiFi access point, instead use Apple's Airport Extreme router. Per the article, Airport Extreme's have support for IPv6 built right into the router, and the router will *automatically* route IPv6 traffic using the 6to4 standard (which basically tunnels the traffic over the IPv4 connection from the ISP).

Indeed. I was quite impressed to read about that. I have been thinking for quite a while that router makes should be doing exactly that, so it's good to see that at least one of them does.

On the quite opposite hand, there's Vista. While the article pointed out that Vista sets up 6to4 automatically when it has a globally routable IPv4 address (which is a good thing, of course), there's an annoying other side to that coin. See, Vista announces that it routes through its 6to4 address, but then in actual fact doesn't (it just drops the packets silently). It has been annoying me quite some times when I've connected to a public WiFi access point at my university, only to see every IPv6-enabled site (including my own!) fail miserably since my Linux laptop will try to route through one of these Vista black holes. That's Microsoft for you...

Re:This result seems to be because of Apple router

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we get a list of home wireless routers that will support this?
I didn't see it in any Belkins or D-Links I purchased in the last 2 years, though IPv6 was somewhat of a hot topic.

So I have to ask. In this age of "Now supporting Draft N!!!" and "MIMO ANTENNAE ARE GOOD FOR YOUR MULTIMEDIA HOME!" "I'M TWICE AS FAST AS G ROUTERS IF YOU BUY MY SAME BRAND G-RECEIVER!" With all the excuses to upgrade your router, where are all the much wanted "NOW WITH IPV6! FUTURE PROOF YOUR HOME LAN SO YOU'LL NEVAARR RUN OUT OF IP ADDRESSES" (wink)

I know cash is hard to come by these days, but geeks in the US are slaves to gadgets.

Re:How can they tell?

[TheLink]

1) You still need to use IPv4 if sites you need to use still don't support IPv6 or are unreachable from your network.

For example - say you have a machine without an IPv4 address at all. How would you access the following sites:
mail.google.com
www.windowsupdate.com
security.ubuntu.com
mail.yahoo.com

I can list more.

2) You still need NAT if you are using dynamic IPv4 addresses.

Why?

Imagine what happens if the ISP gives you public IP range 4.5.5.0/252

But you drop and reconnect and are given public IP range 4.6.6.0/252

How long will it take for your machine to realize that it's IP address, DNS server and default gateway settings are wrong?

3) You still need NAT even if you are using static IPv4 addresses

There is an IPv4 shortage, so you need NAT to share the address(es) you get from the ISP.

If you think we can ignore the IPv4 shortage by switching your machines to IPv6, see 1).

Lastly, saying that DNS problem still applies because of NAT is wrong. NAT devices could randomize port numbers, there is nothing about doing NAT that requires a NAT device to not randomize port numbers. It's just like BIND could have randomized port numbers like djbdns did, but it didn't, so whose fault was that?

Re:How can they tell?

[mikael_j]

2) You still need NAT if you are using dynamic IPv4 addresses. Why? Imagine what happens if the ISP gives you public IP range 4.5.5.0/252 But you drop and reconnect and are given public IP range 4.6.6.0/252 How long will it take for your machine to realize that it's IP address, DNS server and default gateway settings are wrong?

I take it someone has never encountered an ISP that provides more than one IP address to each customer? Back in 1998 when I first got ADSL the ISP I used handed out 5 IP addresses per connection, and I've worked with ISPs that will gladly hand out up to 10 IP addresses per (physical) connection, so a lot of their more knowledgeable users are actually skipping NAT altogether and instead using public IP addresses for all their computers. And guess what, this is how the internet used to work and how it was intended to work. End to end connectivity.

/Mikael

Re:You're not so smart yourself

[chrome]

Perfectly valid for ipv4. Ipv6 is a different story. Go read up on how it works. Ipv6 needs no dhcp server.

Re:This result seems to be because of Apple router

[Andy Dodd]

I think it's more likely due to the fact that Apple has typically had an advantage in educational institutions. Most residential ISPs still don't provide IPv6 support, but I would not be surprised if nearly every college and university in the U.S. supported IPv6 to the end user.

Doesn't matter if your router supports IPv6 if your ISP does not.

Re:This result seems to be because of Apple router

[TheRaven64]

Have the security issues (i.e. the fact that it makes it trivial to forge addresses) with 6to4 been fixed yet? If not, enabling 6to4 by default is not a great idea...