IPv6 Still Less Than 1% – Time to Join the Fight

April 20th, 2011 by · 4 Comments

Recent data from Arbor Networks says that despite greater attention lately the share of internet traffic today that is transferred over IPv6 is still well below 1%.  And much of that is carried via tunneling rather than via native IPv6.  There’s only one word that adequately describes the speed of the transition thus far for the internet as a whole: pathetic.

But it’s not as if nobody is ready, there’s been quite a lot of work done at the infrastructure level and pretty much all network operators say they’re ready in some form.  It’s just that for content providers, whoever goes first will face a no-win PR situation.  If everything goes well, then nobody notices.  If everything does not go well, then everybody notices – because between blogs and tweets the one thing that this generation is more effective at than any in history, it is whining about stuff that doesn’t work.

Since Telecom Ramblings is obviously a part of the new media, and since I have a software and technical background and handle more of the details of a website personally than most who write about them, I’m going to make an effort to do more than complain about how slow other people are working.  I don’t know if they’ll have me officially, but I’m going to see if I can join the IPv6 day and make Telecom Ramblings or some piece of it available over IPv6 for June 8.  Not only that, I’m going to document just what hurdles I run into.

If nothing else, I’ll manage to figure out where the roadblock is – even if it’s just me.  Because in all the reporting on IPv4 exhaustion and the IPv6 transition, I see little out there explaining precisely whose desk this long-delayed process is sitting on.

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Categories: Internet Traffic

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4 Comments So Far


  • Erik says:

    That’s just great! Thanks for joining in!

  • Clevus says:

    In some ways this sounds a bit like the Y2K fears, lots of hand wringing while in the the background a lot of work is quietly going on to cover it. Of course the opposite could be true too, nobody doing anything because the other guy is going to cover me.

    • Rob Powell says:

      With Y2K, it was mostly obvious who was on the hook and what they needed to do. My problem here is figuring out one thing. I run a website and am willing to do the work to make it IPv6-capable, but just where in the chain of technology is the holdup?

  • Ted K. says:

    The ends are ready (software supports IPv6, but possibly turned off) BUT some of the links in between aren’t. Try the following URL to see what your browser and ISP can handle :
    http://test-ipv6.com/
    . Also, you can ask your hosting service what they are doing to support IPv6 access. They may have it turned on but their ISP might not be ready.

    Some sites on the web are dual-ported (IPv4 + IPv6). The usual example is Google :
    IPv4] http://www.google.com/
    IPv6] http://ipv6.google.com/
    Info] http://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/

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