Global Rollout of Permanent IPv6 Connectivity Sparked Few Problems, But Much More Work Remains

Launch day participants included major industry players as well as home router manufacturers and ISPs in more than 100 countries, several said in a joint press release. “By making IPv6 the ‘new normal,’ these companies are enabling millions of end users to enjoy its benefits without having to do anything themselves,” they said. Support from companies such as Google, Facebook, YouTube and Yahoo “delivers a critical message to the world: IPv6 is not just a ‘nice to have,’ it is ready for business today and will soon be a ‘must have,'” said Internet Society Chief Internet Technology Officer Leslie Daigle. Akamai, AT&T, Bing for Microsoft, Cisco, Comcast, Facebook, Google and Internode joined in the statement.

Cisco was still monitoring the situation at our deadline but the day had been “a very big success” so far because “nothing really happened,” Alain Fiocco, senior director, network software & system technology group marketing and architecture, said around noon EDT. Cisco established its IPv6 presence on several of its own websites with no problems reported, he told us. The performance level was similar to that of IPv4, he said. Nor did Cisco customers report any serious issues in phone checks made every two hours Tuesday, he said. The only problem was a misconfigured firewall, he said. And there have been no potential security issues raised, either by Cisco’s security centers or its customers’, he said.

Fiocco stressed that the launch was still in progress and the mission isn’t yet accomplished. “This is a milestone,” he said, but there are many more networks and users to enable.

Akamai was serving more than 100 times the traffic on IPv6 as served at last June’s IPv6 global test, said Chief Systems Architect Erik Nygren in an interview. Akamai’s traffic volume chart didn’t show a big spike at the start of the event because its customers have been upgrading to the new version over the last few months, he said. Akamai tried to treat the world launch as a milestone in the history of the Internet rather than a one-shot event, to allow customers to turn to the technology in a non-rushed fashion, he said. Nygren agreed that any problems so far have been relegated to the “minor glitches” category.

Comcast didn’t expect anything out of the ordinary and everything so far was “smooth and uneventful” at our deadline, said John Brzozowski, chief architect for IPv6. The company has spent the last seven years defining and preparing the process to add the new version to customers’ existing IPv4, he told us. Comcast saw a 25 percent usage increase early on Wednesday and expected another peak later in the evening, he said.

Domain name provider Go Daddy announced the availability of IPv6-enabled Linux virtual dedicated servers to give customers preparing for the change-over dual-technology hosting solutions. “Deploying IPv6 is like upgrading the Internet,” Chief Technology Officer Wayne Thayer said in a company blog post. Last year, the domain giant enabled queries over IPv6 for the tens of millions of domain name system zones it hosts, he said. Since DNS is used to resolve virtually every website on the Internet, IPv6 support is a key component of the overall transition, he said. Content delivery network EdgeCast announced “IPv6 compliance,” a free feature offered on an opt-in basis to all customers that lets them immediately receive content from the EdgeCast network via IPv6.

France Telecom-Orange’s portal in France and Orange Business Services websites will now be IPv6-compatible. Poland will be the first Orange country to offer IPv6 connectivity to its mobile customers beginning this month and to fixed-line users in November, it said Tuesday. Deployment work continues in Belgium, France, Moldova, Romania and Senegal, and Orange has rolled out new projects in Kenya, Uganda, Madagascar and Jordan, it said.

Slow EU Take-Up Criticized

Deploying IPv6 is a key action under the EU Digital Agenda because unless existing Internet infrastructure is upgraded, the Internet will “slow down as a result of its own success,” hampering innovation, the European Commission said Wednesday. The final IPv4 addresses allocated to Europe will be handed out this year, it said. Moving to IPv6 is essential to ensure that enough Internet addresses are available for all the computers, mobiles and other devices users want to connect to the Internet, and to boost Internet security levels, it said.

Migration to the new version is pricey but renewing information technology equipment to make it IPv6-compatible could keep costs down, the EC said. Both versions will run in parallel until switchover is complete, it said. There are transition mechanisms in place, such as dual-stack implementation, to enable IPv4 to be entirely replaced by the newer version, it said. But EU governments, Internet content and service providers and businesses that use IP technology must get on board, it said.

A survey of the top 67 ISPs in North America, Japan, Europe and Latin America on their plans and concerns about the transition found that 97 percent have already either put in place or plan to implement IPv6, said Nominum, which provides domain name system-based applications for service providers. But there are wide regional differences in deployment plans, it said. Every Japanese ISP surveyed has already rolled out IPv6, it said Wednesday.

Just 25 percent of North American respondents have done so, although all plan to do it by year’s end, Nominum said. Only 48 percent of European, and 20 percent of Latin American, respondents plan to deploy the new version by the end of 2012, it said. European ISPs “appear to have the greatest risk of not making the transition in time” because under current policies, the Regional Internet Registry for Europe is projected to run out of Ipv4 addresses later this year, it said.

"Not surprisingly,” making room for new subscribers was the number one business reason given for switching to IPv6, Nominum said. But most ISPs are failing to look beyond software support and interoperability testing to the key business benefits the new version enables, it said. These include revenue growth, connected homes and machine-to-machine uses, customer loyalty and network efficiency, it said. The survey also found that despite the extra costs associated with customer-premises equipment (CPE), 80 percent of the ISPs polled plan to use dual-stack technology to move to IPv6 instead of other approaches, it said.

The launch should mark the culmination of ISP efforts to increase commercial IPv6 services, but rollout is being hampered by the existence of older CPE, Ovum analyst David Krozier said. Verizon now supports business and government customers with IPv6 services, and its LTE network is IPv6-enabled, he said. AT&T plans full IPv6 deployment for 2020 and over some commercial services now, he said. Comcast offers such service to more than 1 percent of its residential wireline subscribers and Time Warner also offers IPv6 to residential users, he said. Internode in Australia and ISPs in Hong Kong, the Netherlands and elsewhere are offering IPv6 connectivity, he said.

Ovum believes implementing the new version is mainly a software or firmware issue for most network equipment, although older home residential gateways may need replacement, Krozier said. Most recent-vintage computers are IPv6-ready, and Microsoft Vista, Windows 7 and MAC OSX 10.7 all have the technology enabled by default, he said. The Android and Apple iOS systems also enable it by default, so when carriers put IPv6 in place, in many cases users’ equipment will automatically connect to the Internet using that version, he said.

Participants will be digesting the results of the world launch in the days ahead, some said. What will come out from the data is that IPv6 has gone from being something that one year ago was mostly used in research labs and by a few experimenters to something mainstream, Akamai’s Nygren said. Significant parts of the Internet will now use the technology and more and more top websites will run it, he said. End-user networks have started to turn on IPv6 “for real” now, he said.

The number of IPv6-enabled sites will still be limited, largely due to home gateways and other devices that aren’t equipped to handle it until they're upgraded, Nygren said. But the percentage of U.S. users has tripled from 0.2 percent last fall to 0.6 percent now and rising, he said.

The results of the launch will show that while there’s a lot of momentum toward switchover, there is still a lot of opportunity in the consumer electronics space for enabling network and consumer equipment to support IPv6, Brzozowski said. Another take-away will be that because content service providers such as Comcast can’t switch the new version on and off without disrupting their customers, they will leave it on and the adoption rate will steepen, he said.