QUIC traffic throttled on AT&T residential

Wed Feb 19 02:40:18 UTC 2020

On 2020-02-18 4:32 p.m., Michael Brown wrote:
> With blocking in these cases, QUIC falls back to TCP, Happy Eyeballs
> falls back to IPv4, everybody's happy.

The IPv6 deployment landscape might look considerably better if browser 
developers were instead to work together to co-ordinate an "unhappy 
eyeballs" algorithm that was rolled out over time, gradually degrading 
performance for IPv4-only connectivity situations. Now that 
non-evergreen browsers are pretty much dead, this might even be a 
realistic proposal, especially if it were done gradually enough. Google 
announcing a ranking penalty for IPv4-only sites wouldn't hurt either.

A while after implementing "unhappy eyeballs", once the performance 
penalties are severe enough that IPv6 adoption is high, the algorithm 
could be further adjusted to gradually impose penalties on sites that 
dual-stack instead of going v6-only. Growing prevalence of IPv6-only 
sites is probably the only thing that will get a lot of access networks 
to support v6.

The problem with happy eyeballs is that it works too well: excellent 
backwards compatibility reduces or eliminates the incentives for progress.

Happy eyeballs was necessary for it be realistic for sites to deploy 
IPv6 support, but now it holds us back.

--

Daniel Dent

https://www.danieldent.com