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US Has More IPv6 Eyeballs Than Asia, Because of Apple

Posted by timothy on from the yummy-apple dept.

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."

3 of 162 comments (clear)

  1. Linux much by Enderandrew · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
    1. Re:Linux much by RalphBNumbers · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
      "The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
  2. Re:This result seems to be because of Apple router by Dolda2000 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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...