IPv6 Use Said Significantly Up in Relative But Not Absolute Terms Since 2012 World Launch
IPv6 is making “steady progress, nothing spectacular,” said Alain Fiocco, senior director of Cisco’s IPv6 program, in an interview. By October, 16 months after the June 2012 world IPv6 launch, the number of access networks that managed measurable IPv6 traffic toward the measurers at Google, Facebook and Yahoo had jumped from 69 to 197, Internet Society Chief Internet Technology Officer Leslie Daigle told us. That 1.5-2 percent of Internet users now use the technology is “significant growth in relative terms” over the past year, but “in absolute terms it’s still 1 in 50,” said Geoff Huston, chief scientist at the Asia Pacific Network Information Center. Whether the business case for IPv6 has finally been made remains to be seen, he said.
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"We're seeing increased uptake of IPv6 from operators around the world,” said Daigle. In addition to the much larger number of access networks using IPv6 after the global launch (CD June 6/2012 p7), the top five websites on Web information company Alexa are all IPv6-enabled, “which means that a sizable amount of any given user’s activities can be done over IPv6,” she said. A year ago, less than 1 percent of the traffic Google saw came over the technology, she said. At the end of September, that number hit 2 percent, and in October was already at 2.25 percent, she said.
IPv6 network infrastructure continues to expand in a natural progression, said Fiocco. On the content side, Cisco sees many small networks, but few big ones, enabling IPv6, so the overall amount of video content available hasn’t changed much, he said. Small websites are enabling the technology because they're hosted by Web providers or hosts that have already turned it on and are bringing customers behind them, he said. In addition, companies such as Amazon have shifted on behalf of their own customers, Fiocco said. So whether original content is IPv6 or not, Amazon now shows that material on IPv4 or IPv6 on the edge of the content delivery network (CDN), not on their original servers, he said.
The user side is probably seeing the most interesting growth, said Fiocco. The number of users globally doubles every eight months, he said. The accelerating rate is mostly coming from the U.S., Germany, France, Japan, and even Switzerland, where native IPv6 use is now over 10 percent because Swisscom turned it on in cities, he said. U.S. take-up is close to 5 percent, Germany and France are more than 5 percent, and Japan has reached around 4 percent, he said.
The U.K. has no significant number of users, Fiocco said. In mature markets, the number of DSL users isn’t growing much, so the pressure for IPv6 take-up is less, he said. British Telecom, for instance, isn’t running out of IPv4 addresses because there aren’t a lot of new DSL users, he said. The situation is different in the mobile arena, however, he said. In some countries, the Internet community comes together to push for IPv6, but that hasn’t happened in the U.K., he said.
CDN plays a significant role in the transition, said Fiocco. Media outlets or other content owners that want to give customers a good experience when they access it may go to Akamai, Limelight or similar companies and ask to have the content cached on their sites, he said. When customers then do a domain name system query, they get the IP address for the cache, rather than the original site where the content was uploaded, and the material is presented in IPv6 rather than IPv4, he said. CDN can make content available to IPv6 users, he said.
In fixed access networks, some people are deploying IPv6 and then using Carrier-grade network address translation (CGN), Fiocco said. If there’s a dual-stack system, the IPv4 address may be translating behind the CGN while the IPv6 data goes directly, he said. There’s no problem with running both systems, said Fiocco. He said he’s pushing regulators for globally routable access, either via IPv6 or IPv4 behind CGN, so one technology isn’t favored over the other, he said. Cisco also wants users whose ISPs deploy CGNs to know how many other users they're sharing their public IP address with, he said. In the U.S., most ISPs using CGNs are making that information public and giving users the choice to opt out of either IPv6 or IPv4 CGN, he said. People are starting to see that it’s unfair to do CGN without telling end-users, he said.
The identities of ISPs rolling out IPv6 on a mass scale “are interesting,” said Huston. In the past year, Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and Time Warner Cable appear to have launched programs to enable IPv6 on their entire networks, he said. A similar picture is emerging in Germany with Deutsche Telekom and in Japan with KDDI, he said.
"This exposes a curious thing about this business,” Huston said. It’s not about doing whatever you want, because if you did that your customers might have no one to talk to, he said. “What is required is to do what everyone else is going,” so your customers can speak to their customers, he said.
What happens when some of the larger providers in some of the world’s bigger markets start enabling their customers with IPv6, Huston asked. “If the business case in the Internet is, to put it simply, to follow the market leaders, then yes, the business case for IPv6 has changed substantially in the past 12 months.” Whether that’s enough to provide direction and momentum for the rest of the market, “I suppose we'll see in the coming months,” he said.