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IPv6 test.

Two separate questions, and they have different answers. Whether your own connection speaks IPv6, and whether a site publishes an IPv6 address at all.

Your connection

Does this connection have IPv6?

This probes all five of our regions, and in each one it tries a host that publishes only an IPv4 address and another that publishes only an IPv6 address. It starts on its own and takes a few seconds.

Why five regions

Partial IPv6 is the failure that hides.

Most IPv6 faults are not a switch being off. They are a route that works to one part of the world and not another, and that is exactly the shape a single test cannot see.

IPv6 is the least exercised part of most networks. It is often carried on a different path from IPv4, through different peers, sometimes by a different team. So a provider can route v6 to Frankfurt perfectly and drop it on the way to Singapore, and every test run from one location will report that everything is fine.

The person who notices is the visitor in the region that is broken. They get a slow failure, a timeout, or a page that will not load at all, while everyone else sees a site working normally. That is why this test runs from all five regions and reports them separately, rather than picking one and calling it an answer.

Read the table, not just the headline. IPv6 working in three regions out of five is not a pass with a small blemish. It means a share of your visitors cannot reach you at all, and it will not show up on any test run from the wrong city.

Your site

Is a site ready for IPv6?

Looks up the A, AAAA and CNAME records. It does not contact the host, so it reports what DNS says rather than whether the address answers.

The catch

An AAAA record is a promise, not a proof.

This is the part worth understanding. Publishing an IPv6 address tells the world you are reachable over v6, and DNS has no way to check whether that is true.

No AAAA record

The site is IPv4 only. Nothing is broken. Every visitor is reached over v4, and a visitor whose network carries no IPv4 simply cannot get there.

AAAA record, working path

Dual stack, and the intended outcome. Each visitor arrives over whichever family their network supports, with no configuration on their side at all.

AAAA record, broken path

The worst of the three. A v6-capable visitor is sent to an address that does not answer, while a v4 visitor sees a working site and never knows. This is why a record should only be published once the path has been tested.

Next

Reachable is not the same as fast.

Once both families answer, the question becomes which one is quicker from where your visitors are. That is a measurement rather than a lookup.

Measure latency from five regions