State of IPv6 from an end-user perspective

IPv6 has been around for a few years now. Your Windows, Mac OS X, [put your favorite OS name here] supports IPv6 very well. Everyone knows IPv6 is cool! It solves your problems.
From an engineering point of view, IPv6 is an excellent protocol. It is well suited for our today internet. But it is rarely used.

The story begins. Some people are rambling about hardware upgrade headaches, other about learning curve, and some people about application transition issues.

As a home user, it is highly unlikely that your service provider offers you native IPv6 connectivity. I tell you, it is highly unlikely that your service provider even have native IPv6 connectivity to its upstream, and in most cases, ISPs even do not have their own IPv6 allocation yet. So if you are that type of geek who wants to see how IPv6 works, you should get an IPv6 tunnel from tunnel brokers.

Forget about hardware upgrades and training courses for now. Let’s see what an IPv6 connectivity will offer you. I am doing some basic DNS AAAA record lookups here. If you are not familiar with that, it means the DNS query for IPv6 address of a host, to see which web sites are offering you services over IPv6.

I start from major websites you will mostly use on a daily basis:

$ host -tAAAA www.google.com
www.google.com is an alias for www.l.google.com.
$ host -tAAAA www.l.google.com
www.l.google.com has no AAAA record

$ host -tAAAA www.yahoo.com
www.yahoo.com is an alias for www.yahoo-ht3.akadns.net.
$ host -tAAAA www.yahoo-ht3.akadns.net
www.yahoo-ht3.akadns.net has no AAAA record

$ host -tAAAA www.microsoft.com
www.microsoft.com is an alias for toggle.www.ms.akadns.net.
toggle.www.ms.akadns.net is an alias for g.www.ms.akadns.net.
g.www.ms.akadns.net is an alias for lb1.www.ms.akadns.net.
$ host -tAAAA lb1.www.ms.akadns.net
lb1.www.ms.akadns.net has no AAAA record

$ host -tAAAA www.amazon.com
www.amazon.com has no AAAA record

$ host -tAAAA www.paypal.com
www.paypal.com has no AAAA record

So far so good. None of major web sites support IPv6. What about people who sell you pricey IPv6 gear? Lets see:

$ host -tAAAA www.cisco.com
www.cisco.com has no AAAA record

$ host -tAAAA www.juniper.net
www.juniper.net has no AAAA record

Interesting. None of them support IPv6 too. And the people who encourage you to use IPv6:

$ host -tAAAA www.ietf.org
www.ietf.org has IPv6 address 2610:a0:c779:b::d1ad:35b4

$ host -tAAAA www.iana.org
www.iana.org has no AAAA record

$ host -tAAAA www.arin.net
www.arin.net has IPv6 address 2001:500:4:1::80

$ host -tAAAA www.runningipv6.net
www.runningipv6.net has IPv6 address 2001:1af8:2:5::2

$ host -tAAAA playground.sun.com
playground.sun.com has no AAAA record

$ host -tAAAA www.ipv6forum.com
www.ipv6forum.com has IPv6 address 2001:a18:1:20::22

$ host -tAAAA www.ipv6tf.org
www.ipv6tf.org has IPv6 address 2001:7f9:1000:1::103

The result is very interesting. Most services on internet are only available on IPv4. Most service hosting providers have no native IPv6 connectivity. And most ISPs do not offer native IPv6 connectivity to customers.

I am not sure if I am actually helping this transition, but I started using IPv6 at home. My excellent super efficient IPv6 is tunneled over the deficient and weakly designed IPv4. Without IPv4 my IPv6 will not even work. And I am still visiting google.com on IPv4.

This was a rant from an end-user’s point of view. The IPv6 is far from the wide adoption. A hard 10 years is ahead of users and service providers, and 10 good years for network hardware vendors.