IPv6 websites to help you with your adoption initiative — Part 1: IPv6 Statistics
Greetings readers! I’d like to share with you some of the websites I visit regularly as part of my focus on IPv6. As it happens they fall into four general categories: statistics, validation, address planning, and adoption resources. Of course, this is just a small sampling of the many useful IPv6 websites that exist. And of course, I’d love to hear (in the comments or via Twitter) about any websites you’ve found useful where IPv6 is concerned. This week, I’ll cover the websites offering some useful IPv6 adoption statistics.
Up and to the Right: IPv6 Statistics
It’s been quite amusing over the last couple of years to witness the typical astonishment on the part of some of our enterprise customers and prospects when they see the trend in IPv6 adoption visualized. The graph below typically provides the biggest bang for my IPv6 evangelist buck in terms of motivating these folks to move on IPv6. There’s no denying the message inherent in it: IPv6 is not going away. You cannot pretend it isn’t there. Of course your mileage may vary but we all need to remain clear-eyed about the levels of IPv6 adoption and what they might mean for our own organizations now and in the future. The following three sites provide enough carefully organized, up-to-date IPv6 statistics to keep you and your organization in the know.
http://www.worldipv6launch.org/measurements/
World IPv6 Launch was the official website of the 2012 event of the same name (itself a follow-up to 2011’s World IPv6 Day). This critical event marked the moment when a significant number of the world’s biggest content and service providers (Google, Facebook, Akamai, Cisco, AT&T) permanently enabled IPv6 for their websites and key services. Four years later the website still offers regularly updated IPv6 network operator measurements. This is the site to visit when you want to find out what percentage of network traffic service providers like Verizon and Comcast are running over IPv6. The site also has a list of other sites offering IPv6 statistics.
Browsing the list of network operator measurements by rank will give you a sense of which service providers are aggressively adopting IPv6. Of course when determining the overall impact of a given service provider on levels of IPv6 adoption for a country or for the world, size (i.e., their number of customers) matters. For example, sorting the list by level of IPv6 deployment reveals that Digicel Trinidad & Tobago is at 97% (kudos!). But looking at their overall ranking they’re pretty far down the list at 183.
http://6lab.cisco.com/index.php
Cisco’s 6labs offers IPv6 prefix and transit AS data as well as content and user data. One of the main benefits the site offers for the data that are available is to present them by country. If you’re curious as to the status of IPv6 activity in, say, the United Kingdom, you can select it specifically. Historical charts give you the ability to look at the trend in a particular stat for a particular country.
Looking at the historical UK user data chart above, it’s easy to detect that something major happened in the last few months. Jumping back over to World IPv6 Launch measurements page, we can correlate this jump with the enablement of IPv6 by the provider BSkyB.
If you weren’t carefully digging through the site you might miss an unobtrusive link labeled “IPv6 Deployment Forecast.” The link takes you to a different site hosted by none other than the coauthor of Cisco Press’s IPv6 Security (our very own IPv6 CoE TAB member Scott Hogg is the other author).
You may have heard (perhaps even on this site) about global levels of IPv6 adoption reaching more than 50% by as early as the end of 2018. This is the site that facilitates such predictions. Similar projections can be made using other data sources, such as IPv6 prefix data and web servers as well as projections by country.
As part of their “State of the Internet” report, Akamai allows you to “review IPv6 adoption trends at a country or network level.” Given that Akamai is one of the biggest web content front-ends and “content pumps” on the Internet, these data offer another useful point of comparison with the previous two.
Here are a couple of other websites that offer additional perspectives on IPv6 adoption statistics:
http://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6
APNIC’s “IPv6 by country page” is nothing if not colorful! But the angry fruit salad, er, bold colors dramatically and immediately reveal which countries and regions are ahead and which are lagging. The tables with the actual percentages are below but you can hover over each country to see the stats for it.
http://www.delong.com/ipv6_alexa500.html
For web site IPv6 adoption, IPv6 architect and advocate Owen DeLong provides a regularly updated cross-reference of the Alexa top sites that support IPv6.
https://www.arin.net/knowledge/statistics/index.html
Finally, another metric for determining IPv6 adoption is the number of IPv6 prefixes that have been requested from, and allocated, by the various Regional Internet Registries. The North American registry, ARIN, provides such statistics here. RIPE, APNIC, LACNIC, and AFRINIC all offer similar statistics at their web sites.
That’s it for this time around. If I’ve left any of your favorite IPv6 statistics sites out please let me know about them in the comments! Next time, we’ll take a look at websites that will help you determine if your hardware, software — and even the host you’re using — are IPv6-compatible
