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The IPv6 network effect

Editorial Type: Opinion     Date: 07-2018    Views: 5124      





World IPv6 Launch Day took place over six years ago. Marco Hogewoning, Senior External Relations Officer at the RIPE NCC offers some analysis of the progress to replace IPv4

The message from the Internet community over the past 20 years or so has clearly been that the world needs to move to IPv6. And yet, for all of the publicity campaigns and outreach efforts, transitioning to the replacement protocol has taken a lot longer than was initially imagined. But now that global supplies of available IPv4 addresses are dipping to critical levels, we are finally starting to see some real progress.

To date, mobile has been one of the key drivers for IPv6, as opposed to regular ISPs, who often have to contend with a much wider range of legacy hardware and use cases that may not support IPv6. All of the big content providers today are IPv6-capable, including the likes of Facebook, Google, Netflix and YouTube. The large content delivery networks like Amazon, Cloudflare and Akamai have also embraced it.

While deployment by the big players is helpful in terms of signalling to smaller networks that IPv6 is moving ahead, it also benefits those who deploy IPv6 now. To cope with IPv4 scarcity, many networks are forced to use address sharing technologies like Carrier Grade Network Address Translation (CGNAT), which is expensive to deploy and maintain. It also introduces added layers of complexity. Because the giant content providers are responsible for most of today's Internet traffic, a network that switches on IPv6 will see most of its traffic moving over IPv6 immediately. This takes considerable load off of active CGNAT services. And as more networks move to IPv6, the value of this network effect will continue to increase.

WHERE IS IPV6 TODAY?
World IPv6 Launch Day, which aimed to get people to switch on IPv6 and keep it on, was six years ago. Back then, only around 0.62 per cent of Google users were accessing its services over IPv6. Today this figure stands at a respectable 20 per cent, so progress is being made - but global statistics don't tell the whole picture.

In Europe, Belgium has led the pack, and indeed the world, for quite some time, with around 58 per cent of Internet users able to use IPv6. However, in recent years a number of its European neighbours have closed the gap, including Germany (38 per cent), and the UK (25 per cent), according to APNIC data.

In the United States, 44 per cent of Internet users use IPv6, while India (58 per cent) recently surprised many when it suddenly emerged as the country with the most IPv6 users overall, when one single network, with hundreds of millions of subscribers, enabled IPv6. Both in the United States and India, mobile deployments have been responsible for the majority of growth.

On the other hand, there are concerns that some regions are lagging behind. Notably Russia, the Middle East and Africa, where little visible progress is being made save for a few exceptions.

IPV4: THE LEGACY REMAINS
IPv4 isn't going away anytime soon. It will continue to remain as the legacy protocol and it'll take a while for everyone to get the memo. But as the network effect in IPv6 gathers momentum, the arguments for companies to finally execute their deployment plans are becoming much more persuasive, if only to avoid the pain of IPv4 address shortages in the future.

In 2016, the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) announced that it expected the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to stop requiring IPv4 compatibility in new or extended protocols. Similar statements have also come from the IETF since then.

The implications of this are clear: while IPv4 will be around for a while yet, the time to deploy IPv6 is now. NC

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