At the RIPE meeting in Dubai two weeks ago, Google presented results from a study about how IPv6-capable "ordinary users" are. And the results are surprising. While an earlier study by Arbor Networks showed only 0.0026 percent of all traffic was IPv6 enabled, Google determined that world wide, 0.238 percent of their users' systems have IPv6 enabled and prefer to use IPv6 over IPv4 where possible.
The results were obtained by "enrolling" a small fraction of the users visiting www.google.* into the experiment. When displaying search results, these users' browsers were asked to perform a background HTTP request to a Google system with both an IPv4 address and an IPv6 address. The results were recorded along with the OS as reported by the browser and the geolocation of the user's IPv4 address. In addition to the 0.238 percent of all users world wide that have working IPv6 connectivity—which is increasing at a rate of several thousands of a percent per week—there's another 0.09 percent that have IPv6, but it doesn't work. So more than a quarter of all measured IPv6 users have broken IPv6 connectivity.
The results start getting more interesting when correlating IPv6 use with country. The top five IPv6-using countries (that generate significant traffic) are: Russia (0.76 percent), France (0.65 percent), Ukraine (0.64 percent), Norway (0.49 percent), and the US (0.45 percent). The notion that IPv6 is much further along in Asia is apparently a myth: China showed 0.24 percent IPv6-enabled users and Japan 0.15 percent. The reason Russia and Ukraine have so many IPv6 users is unclear, but for France and the US there are explanations. In France, there is an ISP that provides home routers that can easily provide IPv6 connectivity. This one ISP is enough to bring France into the top 5, even though the rest of Europe scores quite low.
In the case of the US, the relatively high IPv6 penetration seems to be the result of Apple's market share being much higher there than elsewhere in the world. It turns out that no less than 52 percent of all IPv6 users have a Mac and use 6to4. Apparently, those users have an Airport Extreme Wi-Fi base station / home router, which has the 6to4 tunneling mechanism enabled. (6to4 creates IPv6 addresses from an IPv4 address and "tunnels" IPv6 packets in IPv4 packets.) In fact, no less than 2.44 percent of Mac OS users are IPv6-capable, compared to 0.93 percent for Linux and 0.32 percent for Vista.
Each of these three operating systems will use IPv6 if there's an IPv6 router, such as the Airport Extreme, available—well, it depends on the distribution with Linux—but Vista goes a step further and uses 6to4 when it's not behind a Network Address Translator. Only 0.03 percent of Windows XP users have IPv6, but on XP, the protocol must be enabled manually.
So apparently, if you give users an IPv6 router, a good number of them will start using the new protocol where possible. Experience at meetings where the network has IPv6 enabled, like the RIPE and IETF meetings, bears this out. This means that as soon as ISPs start making IPv6 available in cable/DSL modems, as well as vendors of aftermarket home routers, we should see the number of IPv6-capable users go up quickly. But then we'd still need IPv6 content to see actual IPv6 traffic—it takes two to tango. This explains why the Arbor IPv6 traffic measurement numbers are so much lower than these Google numbers, which just look at the IPv6 capability.
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