- IPv6 news and information

XS4ALL has enabled IPv6 on their roundcube webmail client. The IPv6 enabled webmail is available on a seperate domain:

https://roundcube.ipv6.xs4all.nl/

In this Q&A session were talking to Robin Elfrink, Robin is a Network Engineer at the Dutch ISP Introweb. And he will tell us about Introweb and their intrest in IPv6.

Please tell us a little about Introweb

Introweb was founded in 1995 as a subsidiary of electronics and security company. We provide connectivity (DSL and fiber), hosting and services as a package, specializing in high-availability and continuity. Introweb has about 35 employees. The way Introweb works has already resulted in a ISO27001 certification.

When and how did IPv6 began to be a part of Introweb?

We got our IPv6 prefix just before 2004, and have since been working to gain experience with it.

What is the current status of IPv6 at Introweb?

About three years ago we started to implement IPv6 in our backbone to
any equipment that supports it. Barring a single switch, our entire
network infrastructure is now IPv6-aware. When buying new equipment we
require IPv6 capabilities.

To promote the use of IPv6 by our clients, we offer a native IPv6 ADSL
connection for the symbolic amount of EUR (IPv) 6,- per month.

http://www.introweb.net/producten/categorien/internet_toegang/economy_adsl/ipv6_adsl.shtml

In what way do you expect to see IPv6 growth in the next couple of years for Introweb?

We see that more companies are experimenting with IPv6. We encourage
that, but it is difficult to quantify expectations. We are certainly ready.

Are there any things you would like to say about IPv6 in general?

There will be a moment in the not too distant future that parts of the
internet will be accessible only over IPv6. When that happens you’d
better be ready.

Thanks Robin for your time to anwser our questions! Keep up the good work!

A few hours ago Opera released the final of Opera 10.50. With this release Opera has fixed a big IPv6 problem.
In previous releases the Opera webbrowser unconditionally preferred IPv6 over IPv4, even if the IPv6 connection was for example a Terredo connection. With this new release Opera complies with RFC3484 and only prefers IPv6 if that connection is native.

The effect that this bug had has been made available by Tore Anderson by including 1×1 pixels over dual stack and IPv4-only on a high traffic website located in Norway. In his latest Februari report there is a IPv6 brokenis of 0.094% and if you exclude Opera it’s 0.029%. Reports are available for October, November, December, Januari and Februari.

Some websites, including Google, don’t offer a AAAA DNS record because of this small portion of customers (but many users if you are a large content provider) they would lose when introducing a AAAA record. Instead they offer something like ipv6.domain.com or in the case of Google set up a whitelist program.  Opera, like most browser, offers upgrades without intervention of the user so this new release should be adopted soon by Opera users. Let’s hope this will inspire content providers to include AAAA records without any limitations. The browsers are ready.

Thanks to Tore Anderson for making these reports available.

Joost Tholhuijsen has posted a nice article about the current IPv6 plans of the top 20 Dutch websites.
Only two sites (Google and Youtube) have there content enabled for the the new Internet protocol. The most websites that are in the top 20 are testing IPv6 or making preparation to do so. A few sites didn’t had any plans to deploy IPv6 or weren’t available for comment.

Read the full article (Dutch).