I sat down in the LACNIC21 conference this morning, opened my laptop and checked several web pages, with seven or eight browser tabs open. Later, I got up, walked around, came back, sat down, and continued reading my Twitter feed. I clicked a link and it failed, so I went looking for another site with the same information.
A few minutes later something else failed, and I realized I might be on the IPv6-only network. But I was confused, because I was still reading Twitter. Then I figured out that I was reading tweets that had been loaded before I’d left the network; Twitter wasn’t actually working.
If I had gone to Bing to search for something, it would have failed, and I would have gone to Google or Yahoo! instead. If I’d tried to create a blog on WordPress, it would have failed, and I would have gone to Blogspot. If I’d tried to upload something to Dropbox, I would have switched to Google.
Content providers don’t know when users will have IPv6. It’s already happening in small corners. Even when there is IPv4, it has higher latency, and if translated, may have less capacity. Web site owners really need IPv6.