There have been quite a number of recent articles about various IPv6 issues. Thus the question: how far along is the actual IPv6 deployment? This is a quick-and-dirty survey that focuses mainly on the content provider side.

What domains were surveyed?

Alexa offers country depended TopSites listings. Domains listed are frequently visited by users from that country, not necessarily hosted there. The data collection is heavily biased towards sites that host files referenced from many different places (e.g. advertisement and social networks). The data collection is chiefly based on optional browser plugins and is as such frequently corrupted (e.g. for Germany mail.ru is listed ahead of rtl.de, msn.de and aol.de).

How was IPv6 deployment surveyed?

For each domain the domain name server was asked for IPv4(A) and IPv6(AAAA) records for the domain, www.domain, it’s mail exchanges and it’s name servers. If an IPv6 record was returned deployment was assumed. There was no check if the advised IPv6 actually provided the service.

Results

(table below, more detailed information on request)

• Up to 16% (New Caledonia and Vietnam) had misconfigured MX records and up to 4% (Macao) had misconfigured NS records.

• two domains Thailand(saonoi.com, tvxq-thailand.com) and one domain in China(duowan.com), Poland(darkwarez.pl) as well as Portugal(artecorporal.org) provided only IPv6 records for mail exchange servers

• three domains in Thailand(kapook.com, saonoi.com, tvxq-thailand.com) and one in Poland(darkwarez.pl) as well as Portugal(artecorporal.org) only provided IPv6 records for domain name servers

• in general the IPv6 deployment for HTTP servers is far better than for SMTP and NS

• These are definitely not the geographic results I would have expected based on various IPv6 articles. Especially not the poor IPv6 deployment by content providers in Japan. The regional differences between China and Taiwan as well as Israel, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia are very interesting.