IPv6-only experience

I was wondering what the Internet would be like if you only had IPv6 today. Well, what's better than to actually try it, right? So I went and completely disabled IPv4 in my PC.

I immediately noticed Skype disconnecting and unable to reconnect. I also noted several sites I have pinned in Chrome stopped working, including whatsapp.com, slack.com and hipchat.com. Also LastPass Chrome extension stopped working. So did Steam and Origin desktop clients.

All Google services were fully accessible, including Gmail, YouTube and Hangouts. Also Facebook, LinkedIn and Infobae (local news site) were accessible.

Netflix was somewhat accessible. While I could fully navigate the site, movies and TV shows were erratic. Sometimes I could watch them, and some other times I received this error message: “You seem to be using an unblocker or proxy”. Apparently Netflix is blocking HE.net tunnels since last June, but clearly it is not working perfectly since sometimes I could actually watch American content without problems (HE.net connections appear to be coming from the US). It is worthwhile to mention that this happened in every device connected to my home, including Android devices and my Hisense Smart TV (!). Note: To my surprise there are strong indications that my TV actually has IPv6 connectivity at least for Netflix. That's the only rational explanation to the behavior I received. That said, I don't have direct evidence of this (e.g. I haven't seen any IPv6 address on the TV or haven't seen any IPv6 packet flowing to and from the TV).

To summarize, as of October 2016 a lot of content is accessible over IPv6, but it's definitely not enough and we still need IPv4.