Sometimes the world presents you with random facts that you just can’t quite get your head around. Then you talk to more people about the same thing and they say they see the same thing too but thought it was just them. The final stage is a NANOG conference panel about that topic because it seems to be happening to every one… (actually stage three might be different depending on what the topic is).

The fact is that it appears as if IPv6 gives you a boost in terms of performance compared to IPv4, not just in the lab but in the wild. A number of ISPs and researchers have been tracking the performance over the last couple of years, not as an explicit test to see if its faster/better but rather to make sure that their deployments aren’t broken or to measure to see how widespread deployment is.

Their key findings…

• 2% of end users are using IPv6 globally
• IPv4 with a single NAT performs 20% worse than native IPv6
• IPv6 connections fail 10x more than IPv4 connections (0.2% as compared to 2%)
• Between 2012 and 2013 there has been an increase in the difference in performance
• Both latency and throughput are better on IPv6
• IPv6 tunnels are bad

So everyone should get out there and make sure their ISP is going to support IPv6 so we can all benefit. As with most of the NANOG presentations you can watch it online  (and its really very interesting if you have 4omins free at some point today)

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ftoy2tp4kDM?rel=0]

More on IPv6
IPv6 hits 2% of traffic on Google
UK IPv6 usage lagging behind global competitors