Interesting Graph - Networks with IPv6 over Time

Introduction

Inspired by our co-operation with the OECD on IPv6 deployment, we want to provide more IPv6 deployment statistics to network operators, and a wider audience of stakeholders including national governments. As a result we created this infographic that shows the percentage of networks (ASes) that announce one or more IPv6 prefixes in the global routing table:

http://v6asns.ripe.net/

For more information on the methodology used, please see footnote [1]. Also note that this prototype uses relatively new HTML technology (HTML canvas), so on older browsers your mileage may vary; the latest versions of FF, Safari, Chrome, IE, Opera are all supported.

Results

This metric provides insight in how many networks have actually deployed IPv6 in a country or group of countries, but it doesn't provide information on the size of the networks, nor on the state of their IPv6 deployment; a network could announce it for a small testlab, or a full production network.

As an example the image below is a comparison between the 5 RIR regions. It shows significant growth over the last couple of months, with APNIC ahead of the rest of the regions.

Figure 1: Networks with IPv6 for the 5 Regional Internet Registries

We added a permalink, so you can share the graph with countries you selected with others. You can use this to show your neighbors how well your country is doing, or ask your local government representative why your country is behind other neighboring countries, for example. If you find an interesting combination of countries, please post it in the comments section below, and if you have an explanation on why certain countries are doing better/worse please provide it too!

We plan to update this graph monthly, so you'll have an up-to-date view of how IPv6 deployment progresses.

I hope this infographic provides a wide audience with a key IPv6 deployment indicator, that allows people to compare countries, and hopefully this spurs some regions that seem to be behind a bit to act ... now.

[1] For every date we sampled, we took a BGP table dump from the Routing Information Service (RIS) and counted the percentage of ASes that announced an IPv6 prefix, relative to the total number of ASes in this routing table. We mapped the ASes to country using the RIR stats files . To assess the accuracy of that mapping we compared it to geolocating all announced IPv4 space for an AS. Geolocation was done with the MaxMind geolocation database. We found that in 89% of ASes all IPv4 address space geolocated to the same country as RIR stats. An extra 5% of ASes geolocated to multiple countries, but the largest fraction of address space geolocated to the same country as RIR stats. Some countries do not show up in this graph, either because there are no ASes in the RIR stats for that country, or the ASes listed for the country are not announcing any address space.