Mitigating Sampling Error when Measuring Internet Client IPv6 Capabilities

Despite the predicted exhaustion of unallocated IPv4 addresses be-tween 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 intrin-sic measurement biases, and demonstrate a novel web-based tech-nique 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 in-creased to nearly 60%. The percentage of connections from clients with native IPv6 using happy eyeballs has risen to over 20%