Estimation of IPv6 Brokenness
Using a technique first proposed by Tore Anderson (and with
Tore's help), this page
contains data about IPv6 brokenness, this is the risk of losing users/customers when a web site
goes dual-stack and publishes both a A and a AAAA for the same URL.
The technique is to embed in the original IPv4-only page an IFRAME with three very small (1x1 pixel) transparent images which are:
- IPv4-only: fetched over IPv4 explicitely (from a FQDN with A only)
- Dual-stack: fetched over IPv4 or IPv6 (from a FQDN with A and AAAA, so, the client decides which protocol statck)
- IPv6-only: fetched over IPv6 explicitely (from a FQDN with AAAA)
By counting how many images were fetched over IPv4-only and comparing with the dual-stack fetches, we can measure:
- IPv6 brokenness: how many users failed to fetched the dual-stack image, assuming that the failure is because they have tried to get the image over IPv6; this is
a good indicator of how many users will experiment time-out/failure is your web site has a AAAA for its generic URL www.example.org rather than www6.example.org;
- IPv6 availability: how many users can actually use IPv6;
- IPv6 preference: comparing dual-stack with IPv6-only images, this gives how many users prefer to use IPv6 when given the choice.
| Date | Sample size | IPv4-only | Dual-stack | IPv6-only | IPv6 brokenness | IPv6 availability | IPv6 preferred |
Since ever
2010-10-06 | 963726 | 778590 | 770999 | 205112 | 0.79 % | 21.28 % | 80.54 % |
Since last month
2013-05-19 | 23162 | 2980 | 2971 | 1068 | 0.04 % | 4.61 % | 75.28 % |
Since last week
2013-06-12 | 2332 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 % | 0 % | N/A % |
Since yesterday
2013-06-18 | 357 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 % | 0 % | N/A % |
Please note that the data is processing once per European night, so, data is always delayed by one day.
Broken user-agents are also collected, you can have a look;
as well as broken ASN, you can have a look.
What about my own web site?
Feel free to add this IPv6 brokenness to your existing IPv4-only web site by adding the following HTML tag on any of your web page
<iframe src="http://test4.vyncke.org/testv6/linkgen-www.example.org.php" width="1" height="1" frameborder="0"></iframe>
Of course, you have to replace www.example.org by the FQDN of your web site ;-)
Once, done, you can go to this page to see brokenness result for your site (computed daily around midnight CET):
http://test4.vyncke.org/testv6/index.php?site=www.example.org
Written by Eric Vyncke (evyncke@cisco.com) October 2010