Advantages of IPv6: Faster connections, richer data

The advantages of IPv6 are numerous, including faster connection experiences for Internet applications, opportunities to collect data about application visitors, and the ability to measure visitor engagement and conversion rates.

[[267981]]

Using IPv6 is faster

If your business offers a public website or mobile app, then it's likely that your site will run faster when using IPv6 versus IPv4. This is in part because service providers provide a lot of network address translation (NAT) for IPv4 network connections.

Carriers lack enough public IPv4 addresses to provide unique addresses for all users, so they direct them by using large-scale NAT technology. IPv4 traffic in carrier networks usually goes through one or more NATs and is backhauled through centralized carrier-grade or large-scale NATs, where customer connections compete for TCP/UDP port space, connection limits, and bandwidth. All of these NATs require recalculation of TCP and UDP headers and checksums, which causes packet transmission delays.

In contrast, most mobile and broadband users now use native IPv6 on their devices. IPv6 packets do not pass through the carrier NAT system, but go directly to the Internet. The lack of NAT for IPv6 means that TCP and UDP header checksums do not need to be recalculated as they do for IPv4.

Even though IPv6 packets have a larger header size and extension headers (more protocol overhead), they are hardware accelerated like IPv4. For systems that support both IPv4 and IPv6, the Happy Eyeballs algorithm helps determine which protocol works faster and selects it, helping to improve the end-user experience.

Facebook, LinkedIn, Google and others have released statistics showing that IPv6 is faster.

The Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), one of five regional Internet registries that monitors round-trip times for IPv4 and IPv6 packets from around the world, showed that, with the exception of Asia, IPv6 has lower latency than IPv4.

Help end users access the Internet

Just as IPv6 can improve performance for customers accessing retail websites, it can also improve performance for business users accessing the Internet from corporate networks.

By default, most host operating systems support both IPv4 and IPv6, so if the corporate network to which the enterprise host is connected also supports IPv6, the end user will automatically have dual-protocol Internet connectivity. Unfortunately, today, most enterprises connect these dual-protocol hosts to access networks that only support IPv4.

Enterprises can begin to take advantage of the benefits of IPv6 if they enable it on their wireless access networks.

IPv6 deployment should start at the edge of the Internet, so when an enterprise begins to implement an IPv6 deployment project, it should ensure that its Internet border security defense supports IPv6. This includes firewalls, DNS servers, load balancers, web application firewalls (WAFs), and cloud access security agents.

Once IPv6 is supported at the perimeter, the next step is to deploy IPv6 in the core network and then to the end users.

Greater customer intimacy

When websites use IPv6, they gain greater customer intimacy by observing the customer's real IP address. When a customer connects to a web site, it logs their IP address. That address can be checked against threat intelligence databases and reputation filters to identify links that are malicious or fraudulent.

Some web sites attempt to use IP addresses as an element of authentication. Usernames and passwords can be associated with an IP address, giving people confidence that the person trying to log in is who they say they are because they are using the same IP address as in the past.

While implementing IPv6 has many benefits, it also raises privacy concerns because without IPv6 NAT, it is possible to capture the true client device address. Some security administrators worry that this will make IPv6 more vulnerable to attacks.

End User Privacy

It may seem that revealing the customer's real IP address somehow compromises security, but according to the IETF, NAT is not a required perimeter security feature for IPv6. Instead, perimeter security can be enforced by a stateful firewall that allows outbound connections but blocks unsolicited inbound connections. So even if someone knows the end user's global IPv6 address, they cannot initiate a connection to that host.

IPv6 has some specific methods to protect end-user privacy by hiding the interface identifier (IID), which is the part of the address that uniquely identifies a host. Organizations do not want to reveal any personal information by including the end-user's device MAC address in the IID.

The method depends on whether the network uses a protocol such as Stateless Address Autoconfiguration (SLAAC) or RDNSS with privacy extensions or using Stable SLAAC.

Furthermore, when using DHCPv6 to lease an IPv6 address to a host, the IID is randomized, preserving the privacy of the end user.