Worries about IPv6 brokenness have been a major stumbling block for content providers wanting to deploy IPv6, an emerging standard that solves the looming address shortage with the Internet’s current standard known as IPv4.
Experts say the IPv6 brokenness problem is lessening for two reasons: Browsers such as Google’s Chrome have enabled a new feature called “fast fallback,” which identifies users suffering from IPv6 brokenness and automatically reconfigures their access to IPv4.
Also, popular websites such as Google [Nasdaq: GOOG], Facebook and Yahoo have engaged in a massive outreach program to users that they feared would suffer from IPv6 brokenness, offering them automated tools to identify and fix the problem. This outreach program coincided with World IPv6 Day, a 24-hour trial of IPv6 that was held on June 8.
“IPv6 brokenness is a declining concern generally, as host and browsers implementations deploy fixes,” agreed Christopher Palmer, an engineer with Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Networking team. He added that Microsoft [Nasdaq: MSFT] “received five calls about IPv6 brokenness on World IPv6 Day, and four of them weren’t real.”
Prior to World IPv6 Day, the Internet Society estimated that as many as 0.05 per cent of Internet users would suffer from IPv6 brokenness during that 24-hour trial. While that percentage may sound miniscule, it actually represents 1 million of the Internet’s estimated 2 billion users.
Yahoo [Nasdaq: YHOO], in particular, worried publicly about the threat of IPv6 brokenness. But Yahoo’s worries appear to be for naught. Igor Gashinsky, a principal architect with Yahoo, said the company’s measurements of IPv6 brokenness have declined threefold in the last 21 months, from 0.078 per cent to 0.022 per cent.
Yahoo’s findings of declining IPv6 brokenness are holding up for other Internet players, including Facebook and Google.
Facebook’s measurements of IPv6 brokenness have fallen from 0.03% of Internet users down to 0.02% since World IPv6 Day, according to Donn Lee from Facebook’s network engineering team.
“We estimate that approximately 0.02% of our users will have slowness in loading Facebook if we turn on www.facebook.com with IPv6 permanently,” Lee said. “That’s what dual-stack brokenness means to us.”
Lee said Facebook sent a message to users that it thought might suffer from IPv6 brokenness prior to World IPv6 Day. He said it appears that many of these users are fixing the problem themselves.
“Brokenness seems to be declining after World IPv6 Day. It surprises me,” Lee said. “I did not expect any brokenness to change. I thought the users would suffer in silence. … But it turns out that without any changes to our instrumentation, the dual-stack brokenness is slowly going down.”
Lorenzo Colitti, a network engineer with Google, said the most important thing Google did for World IPv6 Day was to warn users that it thought would suffer from IPv6 brokenness ahead of time and encourage them to diagnose their systems.
“We put a drop-down box at the top of the Search page telling users that we’re testing IPv6 on June 8 and that they should click here to find out if they’re ready,” Colitti said. “We prepared an IPv6 test site for them to use.”
Google also added what it calls “fast fallback” from IPv6 to IPv4 service in its Chrome browser.
“IPv6 brokenness went down 80 per cent to 90 per cent in the Chrome browser,” Colitti said. “If all browsers behaved like that, we would just publish our Quad A [IPv6] record. Browsers with versions of fast fallback were 99.9995 per cent as reliable as IPv4. We saw similar behavior in Firefox 7. Apple is adding this [feature] in OS X Lion. All we need is [Microsoft Internet Explorer] to follow suit.”