Mar 9, 2009 : IPv6 Support At Meager Four Percent

📅 March 9, 2009 - Growing from 2.4 to 4 percent in 2008, the adoption of next-generation Internet layer protocol IP version 6 is going too slow, which will result in there being no IPv4 address space left if IPv6 is not fully adopted within three years, according to online performance and monitoring provider Pingdom (pingdom.com 👉 Total Reviews: 1
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IPv6 has a much larger address space than IPv4, the current standard facing the threat of address exhaustion, and provides more flexibility in allocating addresses and routing traffic, virtually eliminating the need for network address translation. In a blog post late last week, Pingdom urged the online community to adopt IPv6, a process that was supposed to be completed by 2007.

In October 2008, India-based telecommunications giant Tata Communications (tatacommunications.com -> bigrock.in) partnered with non-profit organization the Internet Systems Consortium (isc.org) to provide IPv6 hosting services for enterprise businesses and service providers. More recently, web hosting provider SoftLayer Technologies (softlayer.com 👉 Total Reviews: 2
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👈 Official Responses: 0 -> ibm.com) began offering native IPv6 support across all its data centers in Dallas, Seattle, and Washington, DC in January. Dedicated hosting provider The Planet and telecommunications provider NTT America have also announced plans to begin offering IPv6 support in March 2009.

These minor successes, however, do little to mitigate a larger problem. Two years past deadline, IPv6 "has become a crisis in the making for the entire Internet," according to the Pingdom blog post.

According to Derek Morr in a CircleID article, 15 percent of the transit networks (such as Sprint, Internet2 and Global Crossing) support IPv6, however, edge networks (including web hosts) so far only offer two percent support. Actual use is so low, in fact, that the largest Internet exchange point in the world, AMS-IX (ams-ix.net -> snel.com), reports only 0.2 percent of its traffic being IPv6. Furthermore, only a quarter of the DNS root servers support IPv6, which remains a huge barrier to IPv6 adoption.

At the current rate, IPv6 needs to be adopted across the entire Internet by the start of 2012, when there will be no new IPv4 addresses left. Pingdom concludes, "There is a LOT of work to be done, and very little time left to do it."