“After releasing the first public betas of iOS 9 and OS X 10.11 this week, Apple has further detailed its new IPv6 support,” Owen Williams reports for TNW.
“As IPv4 addresses run out, the shift to the more abundant IPv6 protocol is becoming increasingly important,” Williams reports. “In a message to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) mailing list, David Schinazi, an engineer on Apple’s CoreOS Networking team, said that the platforms now both use ~99% IPv6 connections, up from 50% in iOS 8 and OS X 10.10.”
“The change is thanks to an updated version of the ‘Happy Eyeballs’ algorithm that automatically detects and chooses the protocol based on whichever responds fastest,” Williams reports. “When the updates are released, it could mean more IPv6 traffic for websites and app builders, with Schinazi saying that ‘if this behavior proves successful during the beta period, you should expect more IPv6 traffic from Apple products in the future.'”
Read more in the full article here.
SEE ALSO:
Apple to iOS devs: IPv6-only cell service is coming soon, get your apps ready – June 16, 2015
What? Duh! Swoosh Over My Head!
Current set of internet protocol unique addresses (IP addresses) is woefully insufficient for all the modern devices that need to connect to the internet. Various work-arounds and half-solutions have been used to overcome this. Most common is using a single proper IP address for multiple devices that are located on the same physical (or WiFi) network; the devices are behind a router (or a firewall), and none of them is actually accessing the internet directly; instead all the internet traffic goes through that router, which is the only device with a proper public IP address.
IP v6 is a new internet protocol, designed some 20 years ago, which allows practically infinite number of valid unique IP addresses. The existing protocol (IPv4) has only a bit over 4 billion. There are seven billion humans on the planet. Almost each one of them already has a mobile phone with an internet connection of some kind. IPv6 is sorely needed.
Apple’s move is a very good one.
Yup. It’s about time we went cold turkey and stopped dragging our feet on this.
When I prepare to do remote support, I often ask “What is your IP address.” I used to get back the simple xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.
Now people try to read to me:
2606:4000:678c:6d00:ae87:a3ef:fe10:570a
Fun fun!
An IP for every atom in the universe. Someday, it won’t be enough. It will need to include quantum matter’s ability to be both a 1 and a 0 simultaneously and we’ll have to move on to IPv7, but we’re a long way off from that right now.
Well obviously they should, considering we’re basically out of IPv4 addresses.
Happy Eyeballs!