IPv6 availability in New Zealand

IPv6 has been around a fair while, and we’re constantly encouraged to learn it and use it. I agree with the sentiment, but it’s been hard for most users when few ISPs offer IPv6 for residential users. Hurricane Electric offers a great free IPv6 tunnel broker service, but that’s impractical for most people. What they need is for their ISP to offer native IPv6, by default.

The ISPs in New Zealand with the largest market share don’t offer IPv6, but some of the smaller ones do. The design of the ISP market here means that users can easily switch between a large range of suppliers, and choose the mix of price/service they want. When I last changed ISP a couple of years ago, I specifically chose an ISP that offers IPv6.

Last year that ISP disabled IPv6 for a few weeks due to some technical issues, and I was disappointed with the support they offered. I wanted to evaluate my other options, but couldn’t find any good source of data that showed which ISPs were offering IPv6. There’s plenty of talk out there about trials, and the like, but most of that hasn’t been updated in years.

So I pulled together the info myself, and put into a Google Spreadsheet. The source file is here, and it’s displayed below:

I know that there are some other ISPs conducting trials, but if those trials are not open to the public, then they should be classed as “No support.” Otherwise those ‘trials’ drag on for years.

Comments and updates are welcome. I’d love to be able to update every ISP on this list, to say “Full support for all services.” Hopefully soon we’ll see one of Vodafone or Orcon/Slingshot go live with full IPv6 support - that will make a huge difference in terms of IPv6 availability to a large share of the market.

This chart from APNIC also makes for interesting reading - look at real-world IPv6 usage across New Zealand ISPs.