Good news, bad news (and free porn) on IPv6

by Stuart Corner

Tuesday, 19 August 2008

Page 1 of 2 ! It's generally agreed that the Internet addresses available under the current IPv4 protocol will be gone within three years. IPv6 is supposed to replace it, but progress has been slow. The good news is that the volume of IPv6 traffic on the net has doubled in the past year. The bad news is... ...that so too has the volume of IPv4 traffic. And the even worse news is that IPv6 traffic represents only a tiny fraction of IPv4 traffic: a mere 0.00026 percent. The free porn? Read on. These figures come from what is claimed to be the world's most comprehensive study of IPv6 traffic http://www.arbornetworks.com/IPv6research   on the Internet, produced by Arbor Networks. According to Arbor, it represents "The results of a year-long research project [and provides] for the first time, a global perspective on the amount of IPv6 traffic on the Internet." Commenting on the report's findings, Arbor Networks' chief scientist, Craig Labovitz, said: "It is now clear the original optimistic IPv6 deployment plans have failed...Based on our analysis, at the current rate of adoption, we are a decade or more away from pervasive adoption of dual stack support for IPv6." However, despite the slow start he said there was cause for optimism. "Throughout the world, government mandates are spurring IPv6 adoption...In the US. a federal mandate was met and all major vendors publicly declared their IPv6 readiness. The Beijing Olympics are being highlighted as the first global showcase for IPv6 technology by China's government." To produce the survey, Arbor collaborated with 91 ISP customers representing a broad cross section of global tier-1 IP network service providers and regional tier 2 ISPs and with large content providers, hosting companies and broadband access providers. Arbor collected anonymised data that covered 2,393 peering and backbone routers, 278,797 customer and peering interfaces and was able to see 4Tbps of inter-domain Internet traffic. The report tracked only IPv6 traffic tunnelled over IPv4 using IP protocol 41, which was universally reported by the monitored routers. Arbor was, however, unable to measure native IPv6 traffic. It explains that many routers are still not capable of exporting flow records for native IPv6 traffic because of either a lack of support in the router's software or hardware, or router configuration issues. CONTINUED << First page <   1 2 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

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