Mirjam Kühne

IPv6 on the March

Mirjam Kühne

3 min read

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Tony Smith from APNIC is looking at the increase in IPv6 deployment now ARIN depleted their free pool of IPv4 addresses.


 

ARIN’s announcement today that it has fully depleted its IPv4 stock would not come as a surprise to anyone in the networking community, but it is still a very important milestone in the Internet’s history. It has naturally created headlines across the world.

But while IPv4 has been hitting the news, it has also been a big week for IPv6 too, with real momentum brewing globally.

Let’s start in the APNIC region first. In India, the State of Kerala announced this week an invitation for tenders to help it transition its data centres and network infrastructure to IPv6. The news follows the Indian Government’s recent announcement to develop 100 “Smart Cities” across the nation by 2022.

In Europe , BT announced that it expects its entire network to be running both IPv4 and IPv6 by the end of 2016 . The company is now looking at the best way to transition its customers to IPv6-ready equipment in their homes to ensure they can use the new network – it said of its 7.8 million customers, 6.3 million will need to upgrade their hardware to use IPv6.  The same story noted that its rival Sky already had around one million customers using IPv6.

Over in the United States , one service provider that has completed its IPv6 deployment is Comcast. In a recent blog post , Comcast’s John Brzozowski mentions that over 15 percent of their Internet traffic is now over IPv6, and that  tens of millions of cable modems  are being managed using IPv6 only (less than 5 percent of cable modems across their network rely on IPv4 today).

All these are impressive IPv6 achievements.

Finally , a development which should help increase IPv6 preference globally was Apple’s release of its new mobile operating system, iOS9.  The new OS requires all apps to support IPv6, and so CloudFlare decided to investigate whether it was starting to make any impact on IPv6 preference.

Although it has only been a week since it was launched, CloudFlare found that IPv6 requests from iOS9 users had already increased by 1% compared to iOS8 users.

These developments around the globe continue to show the transition to IPv6 is gaining momentum. Google’s global IPv6 traffic measurements are now nudging 8.5%, almost double the amount 12 months earlier.

Has your organisation begun its IPv6 transition plan?

 

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About the author

Mirjam Kühne Based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands

I wrote the articles collected here during my time as community builder of the RIPE NCC and the maintainer and editor of RIPE Labs. I have since taken on a new role serving as the Chair of the RIPE Community. You can reach my new profile via the website link below.

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