Huston and Michaelson on IPv6 Deployment: Just Where Are We?
Geoff Huston and George Michaelson recently wrote an article published on Circle ID on IPv6 and looks at where we are now. They say following the stories of impending doom for IPv4 addresses running out, that didn’t eventuate as predicted, we are now getting to the stage where we really will run out of addresses. They write that since “Since 2005 we’ve been consuming IPv4 addresses at a rate of some 160 million addresses per year, and what’s left in the IPv4 unallocated address pool looks like lasting for no more than another 3 years.” Geoff Huston and George Michaelson write an article published on Circle ID on IPv6 and looks at where we are now. They say following the stories of impending doom for IPv4 addresses running out, that didn’t eventuate as predicted, we are now getting to the stage where we really will run out of addresses. They write that since “Since 2005 we’ve been consuming IPv4 addresses at a rate of some 160 million addresses per year, and what’s left in the IPv4 unallocated address pool looks like lasting for no more than another 3 years.”
The article has the following closing observations that are easy to follow:
The Internet is facing some quite fascinating pressures in the coming years as the unallocated pool of IPv4 addresses depletes, and its unclear at this stage just quickly the Internet will transition to a IPv6 network and how such a transition will be deployed in the network. Its also unclear to what extent the Internet will be able to wean itself of the intensive use of NATs, and the relative pressures to undertake a transition to IPv6 or to persist with a deployment model of use of private IPv4 address space, NATs and various forms of protocol translation to fill the connectivity gaps, or even revert back to the networking model of the 1980s and revert to application level gateways to as an incredibly messy glue for tomorrow’s network.
While much of the Ipv6 technology set could be described as operationally ready, IPv6 hosts and service delivery platforms are being deployed, and a visible proportion of the network operating entities on the Internet are undertaking various forms of IPv6 deployments, the real level of uptake of IPv6 in the Internet today in terms of services and, by inference, packets, remains quite small. The metric that could be regarded as perhaps the best pointer of the current level of IPv6 usage is the web server access data, and the actual value of the relative rate of IPv6 use appears to be around 0.3% of the IPv4 use, or a relative rate of 3 per 1,000. The encouraging observation is that the relative use of IPv6 in today’s internet as compared to IPv4 is increasing, so that while the internet continues to grow it appears that IPv6 use is growing at a slightly faster rate.
On the other hand, it also appears that while the relative numbers are increasing, IPv6 is still a very small proportion of the IPv4 Internet, and by whatever metric one would claim is a “critical mass” of IPv6 usage, we’ve yet to achieve and, and it may still be quite some years off yet.
To read the article by Huston and Michaelson in full, see http://www.circleid.com/posts/ipv6_deployment_where_are_we/.