On Jan 14, 2024, at 19:50, Abraham Y. Chen <aychen@avinta.com> wrote:
Hi, Ryan:
1) " ... it
accounts for 40% of the traffic at Google. ":
Perhaps you were
referring to the following?
2) If so, your
quotation is correct, except there are some hidden stories below
the surface:
A. When you
Google for it with key words "IPv6 Traffic Google", the first
hit shows "IPv6 Adoption"
that lead to the above. So, strictly speaking, it is not traffic data
that you are looking at.
Correct, that graph shows fraction of google unique end points that have IPv6 capability. It does not reflect traffic at all.
B. Above the
actual graph, you will find statements, such as "
... the
availability
of IPv6 connectivity
among Google users. ...." So, legally,
the graph is correct on its own right, but may not be exactly
what you thought. Reader be aware!
Correct… I do not know of a graph showing traffic as a percentage for google.
It implies that the
graph the IPv6 capability (equipment readiness) of Google users,
not necessarily the actual traffic they generate. The two do not
equate to each other.
No, it shows actual IPv6 reachable, not equipment capability. Likely there is some relatively close degree of correlation between fraction of users and fraction of traffic, but you are correct that they are independent numbers. It’s entirely possible, I suppose, that that 45% of endpoints reachable via IPv6 represents 10% of Google traffic and doesn’t really use Google very much at all. OTOH, it’s equally likely that 45% of end points is actually responsible for 90% of Google traffic. I doubt that either of these extremes is likely, however.
In many ways, however, the fact that 45% of eyeball endpoints have IPv6 reachability is much more meaningful than whatever random fraction of traffic they happen to represent.
3) However, the above
did seem to support what was generally said in the public.
Until, we found an interesting ongoing (the only one of such
resource that is updated about every ten minutes) statistics by
AMS-IX (AMSterdam Internet eXchange) :
a
The second URL shows
that IPv6 accounts for approximately 5.7% of the overall
Internet traffic that AMS-IX sees today. If one traces back
through the archived data, the earlier numbers were even much
lower. In fact, those graphs looked meaningless, because there
was hardly any visible trace colored for IPv6. This has been
going on for at least the last one decade. So, it could not be
an error.
This isn’t a surprise since the vast majority of Google’s (and most other content providers) traffic is delivered via private network interconnect and not on public peering points.
4) We contacted
AMS-IX for a possible explanation of the obvious discrepancy.
They politely referred us to our own ISPs. This triggered our
curiosity. We decided that we needed to find the full world-wide
IPv6 traffic data.
5) There was an
annual world-wide Internet traffic statistics and forecast
published by Cisco that stopped after
2017 (see URL below to the last issue). We contacted Cisco in 2020 and got an eMail
confirmation.
If you dig deeper on that, you’ll find that their data is purely estimated based on very limited collection.
6) However, there has
never been any equivalent publication for the IPv6 by itself
that we could locate.
There is an interesting bit of data from Akamai in this post:
Which reports that 2022 Akamai IPv6 traffic was over 41Tbps, up from just over 1Gbps in 2012.
While IPv4 has grown in that same 10 years, I doubt that it has grown 4,100,000% in that same 10 years.
7) In search for a
possible explanation of the discrepancy between Pts. 1) &
3), we came across the following article. In brief, it reported
that the Peering agreements among Internet backbone providers
were less settled for IPv6 than IPv4. Thus, higher percentage of
IPv6 traffic than that of IPv4 should have been directed through
the IXs (Internet eXchanges), such as AMS-IX.
1. This is largely untrue today. Most IPv6 capable networks that peer on a public exchange with another IPv6 capable network set up sessions for v4 and v6 at the same time.
2. There’s a much more plausible explanation… Most of the big eyeball networks and most of the big content providers don’t deliver much of their traffic via public exchanges, yet they are the ones most likely to have IPv6 capability. While Akamai, for example, delivers a lot of traffic over Ams-IX, it’s mostly not to major eyeball networks which instead connect to Akamai over private peering. This artificially suppresses the IX perspective on the fraction of traffic that is IPv6 overall.
8) The conclusion of
Pt. 7) furthered our puzzlement, because it was opposite to what
we were hoping for. That is, the roughly 5.7% IPv6 traffic that
AMS-IX sees implies that within the overall Internet, the IPv6
traffic should be even less than 5.7%, not as high as Google's
40+% (Adoption) rate. Since we did not have the resources to
further the research on this topic, we saved the above summary
to share with anyone interested in pursuing for a better
understanding. It will be much appreciated, if you could share
your insights of this topic.
Well, the good news (see my second point in response to 7) is that it’s likely much larger than what you see on the exchange points, as you hoped.
1. 1/3rd (33.75%) of all internet traffic is IPv6.
2. 1/3rd of requests that could traverse IPv6 are being served on IPv4.
If both of those statements are true, then it indicates (theoretically) that turning off IPv4 tomorrow would be nearly lossless.
(33.75% * 3 = 101.25%).
I tend to suspect that the numbers might be a little off here, but the point remains that the amount of the internet that doesn’t work on IPv4 continues to shrink and at some point, the benefit of maintaining v4 will drop below its cost.
The sooner we reach that point, the less pain everyone will have to endure between now and getting there.
Owen