Friday, October 06, 2006
IPv6 has a heartbeat, but ...
IPv6 has a heartbeat, but it is still on life-support.
I have reported on IPv6 and its uptake earlier (here and here). So what is the news?
During this week's RIPE meeting (which is where the people that produce European "Internet electricity" hang out twice a year), two interesting presentations were given.
The first one (by Jasinska) reported on measurements of actual IPv6 flowing through the Amsterdam Internet Exchange. Of the total traffic somewhere around 0.1 % is IPv6 traffic. This does not sound like much, but it is something like 180 megabit/sec, on the average. I remember when this was the entire bandwidth between the US and Europe. Note added later: here is a link with more detail on v6 traffic, and one should also take into account that some IPv6 traffic is tunneled over Ipv4, and may not show up in these statistics.
The second presentation (Garcia and Cerezo) reported on availability of servers. More than one half of the countries on the Internet have working IPv6 DNS servers. An analysis of the top 100 most visited websites per country reveals that somewhere around half a percent of these actually run IPv6. This number is not inconsistent with the traffic
Maybe the current state of IPv6 reminds us of the first ultrasound images of an embryo, where you see one pixel pulsating: that's the heartbeat.
Stay tuned for more, as I am making some interviews within the industry, and maybe we can find out where all that traffic comes from.
I have reported on IPv6 and its uptake earlier (here and here). So what is the news?
During this week's RIPE meeting (which is where the people that produce European "Internet electricity" hang out twice a year), two interesting presentations were given.
The first one (by Jasinska) reported on measurements of actual IPv6 flowing through the Amsterdam Internet Exchange. Of the total traffic somewhere around 0.1 % is IPv6 traffic. This does not sound like much, but it is something like 180 megabit/sec, on the average. I remember when this was the entire bandwidth between the US and Europe. Note added later: here is a link with more detail on v6 traffic, and one should also take into account that some IPv6 traffic is tunneled over Ipv4, and may not show up in these statistics.
The second presentation (Garcia and Cerezo) reported on availability of servers. More than one half of the countries on the Internet have working IPv6 DNS servers. An analysis of the top 100 most visited websites per country reveals that somewhere around half a percent of these actually run IPv6. This number is not inconsistent with the traffic
Maybe the current state of IPv6 reminds us of the first ultrasound images of an embryo, where you see one pixel pulsating: that's the heartbeat.
Stay tuned for more, as I am making some interviews within the industry, and maybe we can find out where all that traffic comes from.
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interestingly, the traffic generated by the participants of the RIPE meeting is about 20% IPv6: more than 4 Mbps IPv6 and 20 Mbps IPv4 if I remember correctly. Unfortunately, I can't find the presentation slides for this on the RIPE-53 pages. This tells me that many operating systems and applications will happily use IPv6 when there is IPv6 connectivity, like there is at the RIPE meetings.
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