Towards a Non-Binary View of IPv6 Adoption#

Sulyab Thottungal Valapu – University of Southern California / Information Sciences Institute (with John Heidemann)

• Why: Not about any of the PM's core areas, but the results reframe a long-running debate with measurement: IPv6 adoption isn't binary, and the "how much" numbers are surprising.
• What: Client-side: 9 months of flow data from 5 dual-stacked LA residences shows daily IPv6 fraction varies enormously (a single application can swing a site between an 11% day and a 91% day), with per-site medians diverging widely. Server-side: a browser-based crawl (dependencies resolved to arbitrary depth) of the Tranco top 100k finds only 12% fully IPv6-loadable — 42% have v6 enabled but 30% of the total still require IPv4 to fully load; fixing the top 5% of popular v4-only resources would fix over 25% of partial sites. Cloud-side: same-tenant paired comparisons (Wilcoxon) show deployment mechanics dominate — CloudFront's automatic v6 hit 71% while S3's opt-in dualstack-URL requirement yields 0.4%; Azure Front Door shows 100% is possible with no opt-out.
• How: Passive flow capture (no payload) for clients; OpenWPM crawl with link-clicking for servers; n×n tenant-pair grid to separate cloud support from tenant choice.
• Where applicable: The cloud recommendations (deploy v6 transparently rather than opt-in) are actionable for any platform provider; the client/server figures are bounded by US broadband and top-100k methodology but the non-binary framing generalizes.