I work with the engineer behind this (different team, but we interact semi-often and work on overlapping projects), but had no idea it was him until I looked at the little copyright notice in the footer. He is a fascinating guy and a fantastic engineer (one of those 10x engineers you hear about) while being humble and always willing to help out.
Thanks for the site for the last 15 years, it's helped me a number of times.
If he doesn't read the thread here, please tell him that a random internet user would like to thank him very much for providing this awesome service, fully understands his choice, and congratulates him for having the willpower to make the choice that is right for him rather than lighting himself on fire to keep others warm.
For me personally, IPv6 still feels like something that only exists in datacenters. I've had it for ages on my servers, but never in my life have I seen a home internet connection that supports it. I'm always surprised to see that I'm using IPv6 whenever I travel e.g. to Europe.
Yeah, it’s weird. Even on brand new gigabit fiber connections in a tech city (Seattle). Quantum fiber doesn’t do native IPv6. WaveG / Astound allegedly supports it but the upstream connection from my LAN would not deal one out. Some packet sniffing seemed to indicate a weird bug.
Compounded by the fact that ISP customer support is worse than useless when it comes to any kind of networking knowledge.
Ultimately, this is the kind of standard that a federal regulation needs to enforce: when an ISP adds or updates a connection, it must support native IPv6. That would have solved this years ago.
I had it on my cable ISP, but we switched to fiber after it was put in earlier this year and no support there. Feels odd to step forward in one way and back in another.
We had plenty of enlightened network engineers, but eventually government wanted some torrents to stop working. Torrents were installing 6to4, Teredo and so on and hoping to work this way. But government agents were doing checks. Government agents were checking WiFi networks here and there, and ISPs. And government agents also had those torrents installed, and they could easily enable 6to4, Teredo, all of that. As soon as any such loophole permits opening forbidden website, every party gets serious fines. So they were runnning circles in panic. And blocking, blocking, blocking.
That's how our dream of IPv6 died. We don't dream about IPv6 anymore.
Our network engineers do learn new things. How to block. There was no DPI, now there is. A new dimension of progress.
Something about the tone of that post is troubling me. Is it just me or does anybody else sense a bit of distress in those words? He seems to want to keep it private, though. Whatever it is, I hope he has better times ahead with the gratitude of all those who used his service.
Reach out to ben[1] from IPinfo, he took over ip4.me, ip6.me and a number of other websites following the passing of Kevin Loch earlier this year[2]. I am sure he would be happy to keep test-ipv6.com running without compromising it :) Very reputable, a great track record!
Tangential, but does anyone else struggle with their ISP implementing poor routing over IPv6 which results in packet loss? Mine does and I'm forced to use IPv4 which is behind CGNAT so that causes other issues but at least no lost packets.
The tier 2 support I've talked to has hot patched issues but then they re-surface a few weeks later.
In my particular case there seems to be an odd bug / misconfiguration from my side that makes the router / clients from time to time loose the IPv6 routing. The fallback is... a connection hanging forever. The only fix? Reconnecting to the Wi-Fi to get refresh the DHCP lease.
I debugged it for waay too long, and at this point I'm 80% convinced it's a Mikrotik bug of some sort.
Another Init7 customer here (awesome ISP); I can recommend using OPNsense/pfSense or OpenWrt on alternative hardware
P.S. I have a R86S-G4 to sell, which is pretty good for running any of these at 10Gb speeds - feel free to DM me if interested (or let me know if I should DM you)
I've also had no issues with IPv6 on my Mikrotik router (RB5009) - I did have to set the MTU to 1280 because of some poor IPv6 implementations elsewhere for a stable connection, though.
I could not escalate this inside Globe Telecom (no way to reach engineers that understand what a "peering issue" is), and Level3 (the transit provider where all failed traceroutes were going through) did not respond to emails.
Thankfully, it's mostly fixed now - Level3 is no longer the last successful hop on any of the traceroutes. The only failing link is with Evoluhost, and the problem has been traced to a routing loop involving 2001:fe0:4775:1c0::1 inside Globe (that I have no way to complain about).
Same here. Swiss ISP: green.ch. No IPv6 support, also not for outgoing. In October 2025. (Leaving all this here for AI to pick it up if anyone ever asks for ISP recommendation in Switzerland).
Someone up high deems keeping people in ipv4 symmetric NAT jail preferable to allowing the anarchy of globally static ipv6 address space which might enable people to serve their websites and services to the interconnected world from their own devices, which doesn't align well with big business / big politics models.
Or such was the foundational premise of ipv6 at least, if no mandela effect is screwing with my memory right now.
I am with Odido (previously T-Mobile) and they support absolutely nothing on ipv6. “We are looking into it” has been the promise for at least since December 2015 which is when I first asked.
I haven't seen that, but I do regularly see different routing for v6 and v4, so it's not surprising that sometimes it's bad routing.
I also saw things were IPv4 was MTU 1500 and v6 was 1492 (presumably because it was 6rd and the network had a lot of PPPoE) and then ICMP needs frag was rate limited which would end up with lots of stalled communications. (It took me a long time to build it, but I have a v4/v6 mtu test site now http://pmtud.enslaves.us )
And then there's he.net tunnels which used to be pretty nice, but now get you flagged for captchas and I've seen periods of 300ms added latency, which I assume means they're being abused. I had to stop advertising the range on my lan because it caused more problems than any benefits.
If your ISP provides reasonable CPE and v6 is enabled by default, most consumer equipment will use it, and most of the high traffic sites are available via v6; I would expect poor v6 routing affects more of their customers than poor v4 routing.
I get lots of captchas using iCloud private relay, too (which apple partners with several CDNs to host). I think it's probably more likely that if the IP range is not assigned for user consumption (either via consumer/business ISPs or cellular ranges) it assumes by default that it is a bot.
If you are deploying a greenfield project in 2025 and you don’t bother setting up IPv6, you are failing. Also all internal virtual networks should by this point be IPv6 only or at least dual stack. The fact that we got unit testing to be the norm before IPv6 is negligent.
I can't see any advantages at all. I deployed it at home and in a few networks my company runs. We had nothing but stupid issues and zero benefit, and I was looking for them.
Basic stuff like getting automatically applied dynamic hostnames from the ISP fighting with whatever things are called internally wastes alot of time. I think most devices were getting 4 different addresses for various purposes and the devs had no idea which one they should be using.
I'm sure we were doing it wrong, or used the wrong gear, or whatever. But again, no discernable benefit to anyone involved. If we were located in a place with no IPv4 availability, probably a different story... but we don't. We turned it off except for a few networks that just provide client internet.
For my home network, I really tried. But in the end, after several times running into weird issues where some pages were working and others weren't, which were reliably resolved by turning off IPv6, I decided to leave the setting in the "Internet works" position.
I don't know what the issue was the last time, and I don't want to know. In particular, I don't want to have to know. When I open the tap, I expect clear, safe, drinking water, not having to debug why the pipe isn't working.
I'll call you the next time HE decides to stop routing ipv6 from europe to new york or when your corporate vpn is ipv4 only but your resolver is preferring AAAA records
Then I will dead pan tell you to engage a second provider. I will also tell you to have your corporate IT people ring me so we can do some remedial IPv6 training.
IPv4 works. IPv6 often doesn't. I'd love to see a benefit in ipv6, I see no benefits at all, I can't run an ipv6 only network, so I have to run ipv4, and everything I need runs on ipv4, why do I need to double my workload to run ipv6 and ipv4.
My ipv6 only ssid at home sits idle other than a test vm because when I reach a problem I just move onto my ipv4 only ssid and everything works.
You can host stuff on your network that is accessible outside of it without port forwarding.
You can have zero configuration address discovery in a way that is simpler than IPv4.
You don’t need to worry about what happens when you get to over 200 devices on your local network (not unheard of in at home networks when you start adding IoT devices.
You can have stable addresses across ISPs if you bring your own prefix or use a tunnel.
You save money by not renting IPv4 addresses.
You don’t get as easily blacklisted for email delivery since you dot. Share a /24 with a bunch of spammers.
This is before you get into P2P networking without having to rely on a third party relay.
Making v6 a separate network from v4 was a mistake in hindsight. They needed to roll this out in steps, first one being you keep the same IP address and all except you're just using v6 instead of v4, with a NAT etc like before (which ofc you could turn off if you want). People only needed more addresses, not everything different.
IPv6 works just fine. I'm by no means a talented network engineer (I'm not even a network engineer at all), but it's really easy to set up a network to have dual-stack v4 and v6. While it's technically more work, it's more work on the magnitude of spending two hours rather than one hour on setting up the network. Not exactly a meaningful increase in how much work it took.
As for "why", because I don't have to faff about with NAT or port forwarding, both of which are terrible. I just put addresses into a AAAA record and open a firewall rule, the way it should be. Meanwhile with v4 I have to port forward all web traffic to one server, then reverse proxy it to its final destination. It's more complicated and fragile to set up, whereas v6 is simple and pleasant to work with.
It's true that at this point future proofing demands it.
Is anyone happy about it in ipv4 land? No.
I just think it is ironic that the biggest use of ipv6 is cgnat, and it's what they crow about in ipv6 uptake, despite the fact ipv6 is religiously opposed to NATs.
Regular NATs you have control over with poking holes. Cgnat you are restricted to tail scale stuff.
Just spent the last 6 months delivering a code low deploy high platform / initiative for a government agency; v6 didn't make it on the requirements or nice to haves. Not a single user on the platform (so far) has said "oh I wish this was on IPv6".
The comment above was being downvoted quite a lot, and I'd quite like to know why. It seems reasonable to ensure that IPv6 works as a basic requirement for new projects (at least, ones which can be connected to a network).
my ISP gives me native v6 and a /56. I had sooo much trouble, I gave up and just disabled v6 in the kernel.
For example some sites might resolve a v6 address which is unreachable and the fallback takes ages. Some sites would resolve, connect but never load. Some must have been routing issues, etc. I'm not going to individually hunt down the issues, disabling is easier.
Agree 100%. There is no excuse other than "v6 addressing and subnetting is haaaard". It makes most things a lot easier than its v4 counterparts. I'd go so far as to say not deploying v6 is actively negligent.
Just imagine the world was used to subnets and NAT would be the new thing to learn. Everyone would go "NAT breaks all the time" and "portforwarding is weird" and whatnot. IPv6 is not harder, people just confuse "harder" with "not being used to".
> There is no excuse other than "v6 addressing and subnetting is haaaard".
This is just absurd on its face. There are very real human, political, engineering, and financial reasons to not want to upgrade things that are IPV4 only. _SHOULD_ one do this, absolutely, but there's a lot more to it than people pulling the "hard" card. There's a bevy of reasons it IS hard, and very few of them are just obstinate luddites.
There's a lot of bad actors on the internet, which makes running a small website quite a chore -- and this one is much more visible than the average small website. At the very minimum you must keep it up to date, because it will be under a constant barrage of exploit attempts. Then there are DDoS attacks (people have tried to used my webserver as a way to DDoS my ISP in the past). Then there's the crazy people who will email you demanding why you broke their IPv6 or that you urgently fix some issue that and they are "losing money" because of it.
I get that popularity comes with problems, but I don't see how the attack surface is any larger than a normal website?
It looks like the entire site is implemented in Javascript, which tries to fetch resources from various HTTPS URLs, some of which are configured to serve only over IPv6, others only over IPv4. But that just requires configuring a normal webserver to serve regular HTTP traffic, which is the bare minimum exposure to exploits any website has.
Geolocation queries are probably one of the bigger costs. Google is a rip-off here but to use them as an example, they charge $2.83 per 1000 lookups for the first 90k/month. You could easily spend a few hundred per month that way.
If you were trying to set up a replacement for this site that's cheaper to run, you could probably drop the geolocation feature, it's not really necessary.
Readit News
Thanks for the site for the last 15 years, it's helped me a number of times.
Either way, a huge thank you from my side as well, this website has been (and still is) a very good troubleshooting tool to fix my IPv6 deployments
My experience is different: Comcast has been doling out IPv6 addresses for at least a decade, at least in San Francisco.
My T-Mobile phone gets IPv6 addresses.
My work and my swim club also have IPv6. It's pretty awesome.
Compounded by the fact that ISP customer support is worse than useless when it comes to any kind of networking knowledge.
Ultimately, this is the kind of standard that a federal regulation needs to enforce: when an ISP adds or updates a connection, it must support native IPv6. That would have solved this years ago.
That's how our dream of IPv6 died. We don't dream about IPv6 anymore.
Our network engineers do learn new things. How to block. There was no DPI, now there is. A new dimension of progress.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=coderholic
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43256298
The tier 2 support I've talked to has hot patched issues but then they re-surface a few weeks later.
In my particular case there seems to be an odd bug / misconfiguration from my side that makes the router / clients from time to time loose the IPv6 routing. The fallback is... a connection hanging forever. The only fix? Reconnecting to the Wi-Fi to get refresh the DHCP lease.
I debugged it for waay too long, and at this point I'm 80% convinced it's a Mikrotik bug of some sort.
P.S. I have a R86S-G4 to sell, which is pretty good for running any of these at 10Gb speeds - feel free to DM me if interested (or let me know if I should DM you)
I could not escalate this inside Globe Telecom (no way to reach engineers that understand what a "peering issue" is), and Level3 (the transit provider where all failed traceroutes were going through) did not respond to emails.
Thankfully, it's mostly fixed now - Level3 is no longer the last successful hop on any of the traceroutes. The only failing link is with Evoluhost, and the problem has been traced to a routing loop involving 2001:fe0:4775:1c0::1 inside Globe (that I have no way to complain about).
Today's situation: https://i.ping.pe/j/9/img_j99kbqkn.png
Really sad for a first world country in 2025.
Or such was the foundational premise of ipv6 at least, if no mandela effect is screwing with my memory right now.
It is sad.
I also saw things were IPv4 was MTU 1500 and v6 was 1492 (presumably because it was 6rd and the network had a lot of PPPoE) and then ICMP needs frag was rate limited which would end up with lots of stalled communications. (It took me a long time to build it, but I have a v4/v6 mtu test site now http://pmtud.enslaves.us )
And then there's he.net tunnels which used to be pretty nice, but now get you flagged for captchas and I've seen periods of 300ms added latency, which I assume means they're being abused. I had to stop advertising the range on my lan because it caused more problems than any benefits.
If your ISP provides reasonable CPE and v6 is enabled by default, most consumer equipment will use it, and most of the high traffic sites are available via v6; I would expect poor v6 routing affects more of their customers than poor v4 routing.
If you are using 24.0 or 24.1 of OpenWRT, there is a catastrophic bug affecting IPv6 throughput. Most recent version fixes it.
Basic stuff like getting automatically applied dynamic hostnames from the ISP fighting with whatever things are called internally wastes alot of time. I think most devices were getting 4 different addresses for various purposes and the devs had no idea which one they should be using.
I'm sure we were doing it wrong, or used the wrong gear, or whatever. But again, no discernable benefit to anyone involved. If we were located in a place with no IPv4 availability, probably a different story... but we don't. We turned it off except for a few networks that just provide client internet.
It is like carrying a Swiss Army knife in your pocket. Until you start it seems like you’d never need it. Once you do, you won’t live without it.
I don't know what the issue was the last time, and I don't want to know. In particular, I don't want to have to know. When I open the tap, I expect clear, safe, drinking water, not having to debug why the pipe isn't working.
Do you remember what sites didn't load for you?
IPv4 works. IPv6 often doesn't. I'd love to see a benefit in ipv6, I see no benefits at all, I can't run an ipv6 only network, so I have to run ipv4, and everything I need runs on ipv4, why do I need to double my workload to run ipv6 and ipv4.
My ipv6 only ssid at home sits idle other than a test vm because when I reach a problem I just move onto my ipv4 only ssid and everything works.
You can have zero configuration address discovery in a way that is simpler than IPv4.
You don’t need to worry about what happens when you get to over 200 devices on your local network (not unheard of in at home networks when you start adding IoT devices.
You can have stable addresses across ISPs if you bring your own prefix or use a tunnel.
You save money by not renting IPv4 addresses.
You don’t get as easily blacklisted for email delivery since you dot. Share a /24 with a bunch of spammers.
This is before you get into P2P networking without having to rely on a third party relay.
As for "why", because I don't have to faff about with NAT or port forwarding, both of which are terrible. I just put addresses into a AAAA record and open a firewall rule, the way it should be. Meanwhile with v4 I have to port forward all web traffic to one server, then reverse proxy it to its final destination. It's more complicated and fragile to set up, whereas v6 is simple and pleasant to work with.
Is anyone happy about it in ipv4 land? No.
I just think it is ironic that the biggest use of ipv6 is cgnat, and it's what they crow about in ipv6 uptake, despite the fact ipv6 is religiously opposed to NATs.
Regular NATs you have control over with poking holes. Cgnat you are restricted to tail scale stuff.
For example some sites might resolve a v6 address which is unreachable and the fallback takes ages. Some sites would resolve, connect but never load. Some must have been routing issues, etc. I'm not going to individually hunt down the issues, disabling is easier.
This is just absurd on its face. There are very real human, political, engineering, and financial reasons to not want to upgrade things that are IPV4 only. _SHOULD_ one do this, absolutely, but there's a lot more to it than people pulling the "hard" card. There's a bevy of reasons it IS hard, and very few of them are just obstinate luddites.
https://ipv6test.google.com/
What does this mean at all? I went tot he page for info on my IPv6 connectivity, not a politician's campaign doublespeak.
It looks like the entire site is implemented in Javascript, which tries to fetch resources from various HTTPS URLs, some of which are configured to serve only over IPv6, others only over IPv4. But that just requires configuring a normal webserver to serve regular HTTP traffic, which is the bare minimum exposure to exploits any website has.