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IPv6 Traffic Volumes Are Low, But Nobody Knows How Low
netbuzz writes "As the June 8 World IPv6 Day experiment draws near, there is universal agreement that little IPv6 traffic is traversing the Internet at the moment. The event is designed in part to increase that volume. However, it will be difficult for Internet policymakers, engineers and the user community at large to tell how the upgrade to IPv6 is progressing because no one has accurate or comprehensive statistics about how much Internet traffic is IPv6 versus IPv4."
And in case you don't know much about IPv6 and why it matters, dave.io has kindly provided "a primer on the IPv6 transition: why it's cool, how to get started with it and what's changed."
I agree that ISPs are one of the major barricades. Since around the first of the year, I've been pressing our ISP for information on their IPv6 support, so we can get in on testing some things on IPv6 day. No one seems to know anything. I've called sales, I've called support, and I've had my queries escalated to "senior technical staff"--none of them knew of anything about their preparations for IPv6. What was even more scary (though perhaps expected) was that most of them had never heard of IPv6.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
A timely article - I just got full native IPv6 running for my home internet connection last week (dual stack, of course).
Works well - the DSL modem connects like usual and the ISP assigns you a dynamic IPv6 /64 for the PPP session (ie. the modem's public IPv6 address), a static /60 for your LAN (your router then dishes out IPs within this subnet to the machines on the network via prefix delegation), and of course your good old standard single IPv4 address.
My Linux, Win 7, Mac OSX machines, iPad and iPhone all had no issue correctly picking up their IPv6 address and using it. The only things on the home network that are still IPv4 only are my old D-link NAS and the Wii. Attempting to access something, IPv6 is tried first, and it that fails it'll fall back to IPv4. Most Google sites are IPv6 enabled it seems, though other than that, the vast majority of stuff I access is still IPv4 only at this stage.
It really is weird having every machine in the house with a unique, globally addressable IP again after all these years behind a single public address using NAT. No more port forwarding.