ACM TechNews

Comprehensive Study Shows IPv6 Shift Isn't Happening

Extreme Tech (08/18/08) Hachman, Mark

Despite predictions that the Internet's IPv4 protocol will run out of addresses sometime in 2011, little seems to have been done to transition to IPv6, the new protocol that will provide enough Internet addresses for the near future, according to an Arbor Networks study. The study found that the there were only about 600 Mbps of inter-domain IPv6 traffic between June 2007 and June of this year, or just 0.0026 percent of the amount of overall IPv4 traffic. The study also found that IPv6 traffic peaked twice between Nov. 4 and Dec. 25 of last year. Arbor's Scott Iekel-Johnson says the largest of these spikes happened when 1,168 people in attendance at a meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force were asked to turn off IPv4 functionality on their network connections and routers and test to see which sites could be accessed. Iekel-Johnson says the fact that just under 1,200 people caused the largest spike in IPv6 traffic over the last 12 months "speaks volumes" about the lack of adoption of the new protocol. He called for action to spur the adoption of IPv6, such as a company issuing a mandate to adopt the protocol. "If Comcast says to its customers, okay, you need to go over to IPv6 because we're out of addresses and we want to add customers, that will force the issue," Iekel-Johnson says.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2328258,00.asp

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