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Infographic: The state of IPv6 adoption

Staff Writer
By Staff Writer, ITWeb
Johannesburg, 03 Aug 2012

Since World IPv6 Launch Day in June, adoption of IPv6 has been steadily increasing, according to data from Akamai.

Akamai tracked real-time traffic data on World IPv6 Launch Day in order to assess IPv6 adoption and traffic levels (the company handles over two trillion Web requests a day). According to the data, Akamai saw 19 million IPv6 address on that day - a figure 67 times the number recorded in 2011.

IPv6 traffic was also 460 times higher than the previous year, at 3.8 billion requests. This has been attributed to both an increase in IPv6 users and more content on IPv6.

“If these trends continue, it is likely that by 2020 we will still see significant use of IPv4, but IPv6 will represent a major portion of Internet traffic and growth,” says Akamai's chief architect, Erik Nygren.

Akamai's data was drawn from the two trillion Web requests it receives per day. The geographic distribution of the IPv6 requests was quite uneven with 71% originating from the US, 21% from Europe, 5.1% from Asia, and only 0.4% from the rest of the world.

Nygren says: “While there are still many years to go before IPv6 is the dominant Internet Protocol, IPv6 is now clearly here for real with no going back, and its adoption is only going to continue to grow.”

Nygren says there are three main factors contributing to the growth of IPv6: content availability, the availability of IPv6 from access network providers, and end-user device support.

“Over the past year, we've seen some of the largest growth coming from major ISPs within the US, as they roll out production IPv6 support to their end-users, including Verizon Wireless, AT&T, and Comcast,” says Nygren. “This is on top of some ISPs in Europe and Asia that have had IPv6 deployed in production for a few years, as well as a long tail of thousands of network providers, universities, and research labs around the globe. More IPv6 growth will come as these networks extend their IPv6 deployments and as other networks join them.”

Nygren adds that with the exception of 4G long-term evolution smartphones, many embedded devices and consumer electronics are slow to gain IPv6 support.

“This has been one of the limiting factors to users whose network providers have rolled out IPv6 capabilities, and, as users upgrade devices over the next few years, this should cause a significant increase in IPv6 usage.”

Nygren adds that along with IPv6 adoption comes the problem of clients infected with IPv6-capable malware. “Looking at one form of attack, we've seen that the geographic distribution of IPv6 attack sources resembles the global distribution of IPv6 addresses. While not a reason to hold off on deploying IPv6, it is important to be aware and to take appropriate safeguards.”

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