Arbor Networks has
published an
extensive
study into the take-up, or otherwise, of the
IPv6 internet traffic protocol.
IPv6 is said to be essential if the web is not to run out of IP
addresses and businesses are to be given greater web security.
Craig Labovitz, Arbor Networks chief scientist, said, "It is now
clear the original optimistic IPv6 deployment plans have failed.
However, the eventual exhaustion of IPv4 allocations [addresses] is
very real and IPv6 adoption will happen.
"Based on our analysis, at the current rate of adoption, we are
a decade or more away from pervasive adoption of dual stack support
for IPv6."
He said the US government issued a federal mandate to demand
IPv6 systems and that all major vendors have now publicly declared
their IPv6 readiness.
The Beijing Olympics are
also being highlighted as the first global showcase for IPv6
technology by China's government.
For its study, Arbor collaborated with 91 ISP customers
representing a broad cross section of global tier-1 IP network
service providers and regional tier 2 ISPs, as well as large
content providers, hosting companies and broadband access
providers.
Arbor collected anonymised data that covered 2,393 peering and
backbone routers and 278,797 customer and peering interfaces. This
made it the largest and most comprehensive study of IPv6 traffic to
date, said Arbor.
The report focused only on IPv6 traffic that is tunnelled over
IPv4 using IP protocol 41, which is universally reported by the
monitored routers.
Arbor observed steady growth in the amount of IPv6 traffic
across its one-year analysis, but IPv6 traffic is still a tiny
percentage of overall Internet traffic. Tunnelled IPv6 traffic
represented only 0.0026% of overall IPv4 traffic.
Juniper Networks enterprise strategy head Hitesh Sheth,
speaking at the firm's recent annual press summit in Lisbon, said,
"There is still some industry debate as to how IPv6 should be
delivered, but like most firms we have IPv6-compliant products
available.
"So far, however, we have only seen specific demand for IPv6 in
the government sector. The Japanese government for instance is
adopting it."
The US and Chinese governments are also adopting IPv6, but the
UK and the rest of the European Union have been sluggish in doing
so, said Sheth.
Sheth said firms were more concerned about ordering
future-proofed IPv4 networking products that could be upgraded when
necessary.
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