Current status of IPv6 implementation (November 2011)

One of our sources within Microsoft and well connected in the IPv6 world made the following statement when we asked him about the current status of IPv6 implementation:

IPv6 deployment is still terribly low. Many organizations have plans to deploy, and the US Federal Government has a mandate to do so on all externally facing web sites by Oct of 2012. So I expect that 2012 will be a steep learning curve for a lot of admins as they try to figure out how to deploy IPv6. In all, less than 1% of Internet traffic is IPv6, but amazingly the number has been growing drastically over the last 12 months. I don't expect to see this growth diminish anytime soon, and I would expect to see exponential growth in traffic this year.

Actually it is starting to get a bit scary as it was some time ago that the latest block of IPv4 addresses was given out. We still don't believe the internet will collapse or something, but we're starting to get a bit amazed that the internet community does not raise a red alert on IPv6 implementation.

Biggest question of course is 'who would raise that flag' or 'who is actually starting to suffer right now'. Maybe the hosting companies running out of blocks? Or Internet Service Providers not being able to serve new areas properly?

Or maybe as usual the whole thing will be pushed forward when the cost of IPv4 blocks is getting too high for important players in the industry. What is the current cost for an IPv4 block anyhow in specific reasons? If you have any indication about that we're very interested to know. Just e‑mail us at info@windows-ipv6.org.

Biggest hurdle

The biggest hurdle seems to be that there are people and companies who disable IPv6. There is a huge amount of fear, uncertainty and doubt out there regarding the behavior of IPv6. Trying to let people know what IPv6 does and does not do is challenging. It boggles ones mind that even now, when we are out of IPv4 addresses and IPv6 deployment is imminent, people still feel like they must disable v6. This mindset is going to be a huge hurdle for IPv6 deployment overall.

Another hurdle

And the last few weeks we were wondering why some of our systems reported not to be able to access the IPv6 Internet and we just found out.

We are running two freenet6 tunnels, one to Amsterdam and one to Sydney and it appears that the Amsterdam gateway cannot connect to http://test-ipv6.com/. Checking with Jason Fesler, running the site, advocate of IPv6 and we think one of the main guru's on IPv6 we found that one of the major carriers, Cogent, seems sometimes to cause difficulties in efficient Internet connectivity.

We're still checking the issue out, but for now our major conclusion is the IPv6 internet is broken and nobody seems to care.

Please report broken IPv6 connections to info@windows-ipv6.org.

News

Who made it all possible

November 11, 2011

We recently found who made reliable IPv6 possible on Microsoft Windows. Read more on program manager IPv6 on Windows.

Multi-Homing with IPv6

June 20, 2011

Well, maybe not really a news item, but today we started a section about IPv6 Multi-Homing.

More news on our news page.

Status

And asking ourselves why someone would want to disable IPv6 one of the clues might be that Windows IPv6 is by far not implemented fully all over the world, not even by the biggest stakeholders and companies.

See our page status.

Why IPV6

And it is really about time this paragraph is rewritten, as the counter stands on something like 'exhausted' for a while now. We did not hear about any real problems yet though, although that might not mean they don't exist.

As we all know, the usage of the Internet has been growing very fast. From a computer network for scientists it has become THE communications network of all people around the world. No wonder that the original protocol definitions do not fit anymore.

The current commonly used protocol for Internet use is the Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4). Although this protocol has proven itself over the years and is very reliable, it has a major problem, namely that it only allows for a limited number of 'addresses'. Although no one involved in the initial definition of this protocol could have ever imagined that the (then) enormous address space would ever exhaust, this is happening very fast now, or actually already has happened as the last block of IPv4 addresses has been assigned already. See below a counter of the available number of IPV4 addresses and you can see it's has counted down to zero and that's been for a while already.

At the moment many computers have been 'hidden' behind routers using the NAT protocol and even though this suits many people and companies very well as it also implicitly implements an unpassable firewall, it goes against the original idea of computers being able to connect directly and even though many people feel very ok with the security the NAT protocol gives them, many applications have to use many tricks to bypass this firewall like mechanism. Time for a new era of Internet protocol: Internet Protocol Version 6.