Mitigating sampling error when measuring internet client IPv6 capabilities

Abstract

Despite the predicted exhaustion of unallocated IPv4 addresses between 2012 and 2014, it remains unclear how many current clients can use its successor, IPv6, to access the Internet. We propose a refinement of previous measurement studies that mitigates intrinsic measurement biases, and demonstrate a novel web-based technique using Google ads to perform IPv6 capability testing on a wider range of clients. After applying our sampling error reduction, we find that 6% of world-wide connections are from IPv6-capable clients, but only 1--2% of connections preferred IPv6 in dual-stack (dual-stack failure rates less than 1%). Except for an uptick around IPv6-day 2011 these proportions were relatively constant, while the percentage of connections with IPv6-capable DNS resolvers has increased to nearly 60%. The percentage of connections from clients with native IPv6 using happy eyeballs has risen to over 20%.