How do I browse the internet from an IPv6 address?

Question

I contacted my ISP's tech support, and was told that I have both an IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. I also contacted my router's manufacturer and was told that the model I'm using supports IPv6.

However, when I test my IP such as asking Google what's my IP, I only get my IPv4 address. How do I use IPv6?

Windows 10 (Pro). Any browser is fine.

EDIT

The information I got was wrong. An additional call to the manufacturer revealed that the router I was using can not use IPv6.

Solution

To “use” an IPv6 address, you’ll want to connect to IPv6-enabled services. When connecting to IPv4 addresses, your IPv4 address will be used. (There are some exception like IPv4/6 transition techniques, but those aren’t relevant for end-users.)

To connect to IPv6 services like google.com, you’ll need the following:

• An IPv6 address
• A DNS server that returns AAAA records (IPv6 addresses)
• IPv6-enabled software (all major browsers today)

If you have an IPv6 address, ipconfig will print something likes this:

Wireless LAN adapter Wi-Fi:

   Connection-specific DNS Suffix  . : w23.lan
   IPv6 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 2a02:8071:xxxx:xxxx::247
   IPv6 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 2a02:8071:xxxx:xxxx:87a:c859:d45e:10b6
   Temporary IPv6 Address. . . . . . : 2a02:8071:xxxx:xxxx:cc9b:117e:ddd6:faa4
   Link-local IPv6 Address . . . . . : fe80::87a:c859:d45e:10b6%24
   IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.2.114
   Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
   Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : fe80::e091:f5ff:fe08:129d%24
                                       192.168.2.1

If you don’t have an IPv6 address or only link-local addresses, you won’t be able to access IPv6 hosts on the Internet.

It may be caused by your ISP not supporting IPv6, your router not supporting IPv6 or a misconfiguration where the router itself gets an IPv6 address but does not receive a prefix to distribute in the local network.

If you have an IPv6 address, you can already connect to IPv6 hosts! However, most of the time, you’ll use addresses like https://www.google.com to browse the Internet, not something like https://[2a00:1450:4001:821::200e] . So you’ll also need a DNS server that provides IPv6 addresses for host names.

If you have an appropriate server, nslookup’s output will look like this:

> google.com
Server:  vpn-router.w23.lan
Address:  192.168.2.1

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:    google.com
Addresses:  2a00:1450:4001:810::200e
          216.58.214.46

If not, you could try Google DNS (8.8.8.8/8.8.4.4) or OpenDNS or any of the other public DNS services. Just be careful not to use any shady services.

If you’re using an up-to-date version of Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Edge, Vivaldi or whatever, you’re good to go. Go to ipv6.whatismyv6.com to verify connectivity.

Either way, you won’t gain anything special from IPv6, except for non-NAT connectivity, which isn’t important to most.

Comments

[ispiro]

Thanks. Non-NAT is exactly the reason I'm looking for this.

[Michael Hampton]

Non-NAT connectivity is important to lots of people; they just are usually unaware of why it benefits them. If they were aware, we would all have had IPv6 long ago.