Internet Census Finds That IPv6 Adoption Grows By 1,900%
Infoblox Inc. today announced results of an IPv6 Census conducted by the Measurement Factory and sponsored by Infoblox. The census revealed that the percentage of zones under .com, .net and .org that support IPv6 has increased by 1,900% over the past 12 months. According to the census, this dramatic increase can be primarily attributed to the introduction of support of IPv6 by a single registrar, Go Daddy.
As the global supply of IPv4 addresses continues to dwindle, supporting IPv6 is becoming an inescapable requirement and will become a business imperative for organizations with an Internet presence. Organizations will need to support the rapidly growing number of customer, partner and visitor IPv6-enabled devices that access their Internet presence. Encouraging registrars and service providers to support IPv6, establishing a prudent migration plan and testing transition technologies are essential to successful adoption of IPv6, which will provide businesses with flexibility and room to grow.
“If your external presence only supports IPv4, then the only devices that can communicate with you will be those with IPv4 addresses,” says Cricket Liu, General Manager of the Infoblox IPv6 Center of Excellence. “To the growing population of pure IPv6 devices, you’re invisible. We can’t ignore the emerging competitive advantages of IPv6, but we also don’t need to adopt IPv6 in one great, costly leap. Focus first on providing IPv6 to the outside world and then work inward in stages. Do this and IPv6 deployment will be relatively painless and prove to be a valuable long-term investment for business growth.”
Data Reveals IPv6 Support by Registrars Can Increase Adoption
The script-based, automated census of IPv6 support by a percentage of .com, .net and .org Internet subdomains revealed:
- A 1,900% increase—from 1.27% in the 2010 sample to 25.4% in the 2011 sample—in the zones that support IPv6.
- IPv6 adoption by popular registrar Go Daddy represents a significant portion of the growth.
- Factoring out Go Daddy’s contribution, the percentage of zones that support IPv6 increased organically more than two-fold over the previous year to over 3%.
- The top three countries in IPv6 adoption are France, the U.S. and the Czech Republic.
- Slightly more than 2% of the zones surveyed were served by mail servers that support IPv6.
- Less than 1% of the zones had IPv6-enabled web servers.
Go Daddy’s adoption of IPv6 illustrates how a single large registrar can have substantial influence on global IPv6 adoption. The high percentages of IPv6 support in France and the Czech Republic are also attributable to adoption by a few registrars: Gandi and OVH in France and Active 24 in the Czech Republic.
Next Steps for Businesses and Internet Users
A significant percentage of businesses run on the registrars’ networks, relying on the registrars’ systems for email and a web presence, which don’t predominantly support IPv6 yet. If the registrars added IPv6 support for email and web servers, a significant impediment to those businesses’ enabling IPv6 would be removed and adoption gains could jump. If a registrar isn’t supporting IPv6, it creates a serious obstacle to any business wanting to implement IPv6 for its external content.
Further, if registrars and service providers are slow in supporting IPv6 and use a cobbled-together approach to transition technologies, end users with IPv6 devices may experience latency, poor performance or no connectivity, which can prompt customer desertion. Suggested next steps to prevent this:
- Registrars should start fully supporting IPv6 externally on name servers and their email and web servers.
- End-user organizations should ask their registrars about plans to support IPv6 and consider alternatives if they don’t get a good answer.
- End-user organizations should make sure they have a domain name system (DNS) implementation that fully supports IPv6.
Useful Resources to Help Manage the IPv6 Transition
To learn more about IPv6 enablement, myths and best practices, the Infoblox IPv6 Center of Excellence offers video tutorials, free trial software, white papers and transition tools. Infoblox also will be hosting a “Best Practices for IPv6” webinar for enterprise IT professionals on Dec. 1, 2011.