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Posted by Aaronmacaron 1 day ago

IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark(www.google.com)
726 points | 518 commentspage 2
neitsab 12 hours ago|
As a French national, I am surprised to discover we are topping the charts according to this analysis.

Does anybody know why that might be the case? What's the story of IPv6 deployment in France?

timpera 11 hours ago||
The regulatory body, ARCEP, has been very proactive since 2002 (!) on IPv6. The recent uptick is due to IPv6 obligations bundled in the 5G spectrum licences.

https://www.arcep.fr/la-regulation/grands-dossiers-internet-...

garganzol 11 hours ago|||
Maybe my guess only, but France has its bit of a technological centralization. I mean, a lot of people use internet from operators like "Orange" / "Free", and in contrast to other countries, routers provided by the operators in France do not suck. The routers are OEM, but overall quality you get from them is on-par with Ubiquity/Mikrotik.

This gives operators a benefit of the vertical control for the whole ecosystem - from top to the bottom, including intricate parts of protocols and routing. And France, in contrast to other countries, does not suck here too - operators usually do a good job of meticulously maintaining their assets.

My personal impression is that this is the result of several cultural factors:

1. Ingrained respect of privacy, private property, and a peace of heart as they call it. As a practical result of that, you do not get spammy messages and ads from operators, banks, etc. You may get some, like 3 or 4 discounts/offers in a year. Compare that to other countries where you can easily get 10s/100s messages like that in a single day. In other countries, instead of upgrading the infrastructure, people are busy with spamming each other.

2. The harsh oceanic environment with hurricanes and storms fosters an appreciation for reliability and functionality. It also encourages a certain frugality: every cent matters. As a result, people tend to develop a strong sensitivity to situations where form is prioritized over function, and such approaches are quickly dismissed as impractical. This gives a certain internal freedom of being able to see through things to determine what they are in the long run and not what they appear to be on the surface.

3. French people don't like to overwork outside of working hours. So choosing something like IPv6 over IPv4 seems like a natural forward-looking investment for the future where you can have less maintenance burden and thus you can devote more time to enjoying other things in life.

Having all those things combined, it's not hard to see why France chose IPv6. It's a natural choice there and it's imposed by survival.

P.S. I've spent some time in France, but was born in another country.

creatonez 3 hours ago|||
This is probably not the real reason, but I find it interesting that France had Minitel (^1) before and later had to switch to the Internet, and then later became the fastest country to complete the IPv6 transition. So perhaps they had an engineering culture that was prepared for the possibility they would have to upgrade the entire network on a nationwide scale.

^1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel

dwedge 11 hours ago|||
I worked with the internet society to mobitor ipv6 adoption for the top million sites ipv6matrix.org it's broken down by country so might answer some of your curiosity
ankit_mishra 12 hours ago|||
I'm wondering the same thing for India. Not the top but looks surprisingly surprisingly high. Perhaps I'm reading the data wrong.
ggm 11 hours ago|||
Reliance Jio deployed cheap native v6 and tool massive market share. They single-handedly moved the market.

It's been discussed on the apnic blog and at meetings heaps

toast0 8 hours ago||
Adding on. Jio was a late entrant, so they could not get significant ipv4 address space without great expense. They deployed as mostly v6 with a tiny CGNAT. They also had an extensive 'pre-release' offering at zero cost to subscribers which got them a huge number of subscribers and clout to encourage internet services to offer ipv6.
lazide 8 hours ago|||
India has about 1.5 billion people, and has only recently been getting most of them online. Less IPv4 legacy, and it has always been obvious that IPv4 was never going to be ‘enough’ to actually onboard everyone anyway.

When I lived in India, everything had IPv6 out of the box.

DANmode 12 hours ago||
Technical literacy, hacker culture, and culture of well-considered infrastructure, have been French characteristics - at least, historically.

Has something changed for the worse?

nfriedly 3 hours ago||
I just recently noticed that my ISP, Frontier, quietly turned on IPv6. I know it wasn't enabled back in December, so it has to have been sometime in the past few months.
thescriptkiddie 2 hours ago|
interestingly my ISP, at&t, quietly turned off ipv6. not sure exactly when it happened, i should get around to complaining about it but i hate making phone calls
p4bl0 13 hours ago||
It amuses me to see that according to the map, France is best in class or close to be, while just a few weeks ago, my ISP in France stopped providing me IPv6 connectivity…

The story is that at the beginning I had IPv6, and a shared dynamic IPv4 behind a CGNAT, I asked for a rollback to a full duplex static IPv4 and for three years I had both a static personal IPv4 and an IPv6. A few weeks ago my router went down and since it went back up, I no longer have an IPv6 address. I called my ISP and they explained that I could either have IPv6 or a static IPv4, but not both, and that it's abnormal that I had both for so long… welp, it's sad to see IPv6 but getting it back is not worth abandoning my static IPv4 and going back to a dynamic shared IPv4.

basilikum 8 hours ago||
You might be interested in https://tunnelbroker.net/ and https://route64.org/ although the later looks a little shady and I haven't tried them.

A cheap VPS or one with spare bandwidth with > /64 that is properly routed (some providers do NDP for some reason) and a Wireguard tunnel would also get you a simple DIY solution.

harg 13 hours ago||
Are you with SFR? I also seem to only have a static IPv4 (I don't pay for it, but it's never changed in the lifetime of the connection). I asked for an IPv6 but they said it was not possible/difficult.
p4bl0 12 hours ago||
Yep, with "RED by SFR" specifically.
fossilwater 10 hours ago||
Among all the major French providers, SFR lags far behind its competition unfortunately
p4bl0 9 hours ago||
I know, but at the time I had to choose an ISP, they were the only ones with an offer with just internet (and a phone line), all others ISP forced a bundle with dozens of TV channels that I don't need along with their internet access subscription. They were also the most competitive price wise, and other than this problem (which is new for me, I had an IPv6 and a static IPv4 until a few weeks ago), I'm satisfied with the service :).
pjf 12 hours ago||
NB: this is not "IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark" but "availability of IPv6 connectivity among Google users", which is a very important difference. This means roughly half of Google users have IPv6 capability, which does not 1:1 correspond how much traffic is actually transferred over IPv6, which is what this submission says in the title.
usui 11 hours ago||
Yeah and this distinction explains the fact that because China's Great Firewall blocks Google, this website shows 4.66% adoption as a reflection of that. I think China's IPv6 support rate is actually much higher than that, maybe a little over 50% because of its central initiative to increase IPv6 adoption?

EDIT: Apparently it's 77% https://pulse.internetsociety.org/en/news/2026/01/china-hits...

ianburrell 4 hours ago|||
"The graph shows the percentage of users that access Google over IPv6."

How would Google know what users have the potential for IPv6 if they are not using it?

easterncalculus 5 hours ago|||
Right, but in most situations clients will prefer IPv6 if its available, so if they have access, they almost always are using it, at the very least from their local network.
kalleboo 11 hours ago|||
It also means you're excluding China, who has has it as a long-term priority to deploy IPv6 and have made huge strides.
umanwizard 6 hours ago||
Wouldn’t it be close? AFAIK modern network libraries on modern OSs default to IPv6 when available.
imoverclocked 15 hours ago||
The question is, "what will the graph look like in the next 10 years?"

I get the whole s-curve trend but if I squint at 2017, there is an inflection to slow the s-curve down.

Annoyingly, when setting up service with a fiber company in the last couple months, I explicitly asked about IPv6 connectivity and they said, "yes." Turns out "yes, but not in my region."

snvzz 15 hours ago|
>I explicitly asked about IPv6 connectivity and they said, "yes."

ABC, Always Be Closing.

Animats 15 hours ago||
It's been amazingly linear since 2014.

amazon.com needs to get with the program. Still IPv4 only.

taf2 10 hours ago||
Just in time for ipv8 - https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-thain-ipv8-00.html
zrail 8 hours ago|
This proposal is absolutely wild.
ffaser5gxlsll 12 hours ago||
Meanwhile: one of the major mobile network in my country announced cisco collab/ipv6 ~5 years ago, but still doesn't provide v6, just v4 CGNAT.

Personal web server running dual stack since early 2010s currently sees 18-20% v6 traffic. When split by type, counting only mobile users it reaches 30% at peak.

Bot/crawler traffic is ironically 100% v4.

Meanwhile: enabled h3 in september last year for the fun of it, instantly at >40% traffic by request count, passing 50% since the beginning of the year, h2 accounting almost all the remaining traffic and plain ssl/http requests <1% being just bots.

e-topy 12 hours ago|
Maybe the best anti-scraper/LLM protection is going IPv6 only. I'd do that on my website, but I'm afraid some clients might not connect.
anonymfus 14 hours ago||
Current submission title:

> IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark

Graph description:

> The graph shows the percentage of users that access Google over IPv6

There are reasons to expect both much more and much less traffic per user on IPv6 compared to IPv4...

jcalvinowens 11 hours ago|
I consistently get 100x as many captchas from google over V6 as over V4, on many different networks: it is obnoxious and obviously broken on their end.
traderj0e 26 minutes ago|
IP reputation is a tough problem with a lot of establishment behind v4. Even if they were to build up v6 reputation, since v6 addresses are cheaper, wouldn't they have lower rep?
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