IPv6 Deployments Continue Acceleration

IPv6 momentum continues to build in the face of global IPv4 address exhaustion. All major Regional Internet Registries but Afrinic have officially exhausted their available IPv4 address space. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) requiring additional IPv4 address space now must rigorously justify their requests. ISP subscriber growth can be satisfied with available though diminishing IPv4 address space, through the use of carrier grade NATs, or with IPv6. Given ever broadening end user device IPv6 support, the ultimate growth strategy requires IPv6 implementation. Many enterprises are actively engaged in deploying IPv6 as well.

Google has been measuring the percentage of IPv6 users accessing their websites for a number of years. Just recently the percentage of users accessing via IPv6 topped 12%. This data represents one perspective though probably a good indicator for the Internet at large. Extrapolating this metric per the chart below, we see the IPv6 density of the Internet doubling to nearly 25% according to our third order polynomial extrapolation. The second order extrapolation predicts 22% in two years.



How does this impact you? If your universe of Internet users to whom you invite access to your website, email servers, or other Internet applications mirrors that of Google, i.e., the whole Internet, it may behoove you to begin deploying IPv6 if you have not already. If one in five Internet users cannot access your website in two years, consider the lost opportunity in terms of commerce, communications, or information sharing. In all fairness, dual stack devices should still be able to access your site given the Internet standard approach of attempting IPv6 connections first, following by IPv4. But at some point it's likely that devices will no longer have access to an IPv4 address and will be only able to communicate via IPv6. Major ISPs have pervasively deployed IPv6 already and Android and ios mobile platforms require support of IPv6-only networks. 

If you have not yet deployed or even considered IPv6 implementation, I invite you to access our free online tools to help you familiarize yourself with business drivers for IPv6, your return on investment (ROI) for deploying IPv6, as well as IPv6 addressing and subnetting.These tools can help you understand the implications both of deploying IPv6 and of not deploying in terms of upside opportunity versus cost.

Our business needs assessment tool provides qualitative feedback based on the relative importance of key IPv6 attributes, while the IPv6 ROI calculator enables you to quantify your revenue upside against your cost to deploy IPv6 for your web presence. This tool also enables you to tweak cost parameters to more finely evaluate your ROI. Our subnet calculator allows you to experiment with IPv6 subnetting and our address planner enables you to try hierarchical address allocation models to determine which approach might work best for your network. All tools include basic help but if you need more details or have feedback, please don’t hesitate to comment on this post or contact me directly.

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