IPv6 Is Really Coming

The IPv6 standard was first published in 1998 which is now 15 years ago. For a while it looked like adoption would drag on forever resulting in some anguished discussions. But by about 2011 IPv6 started to develop real momentum on private networks with Google achieving 95% IPv6 on their internal network at the end of 2011. Another major milestone was World IPv6 Launch Day, which took place last June.

A study that was just presented a couple of weeks ago at the NANOG conference shows (PDF) that IPv6 public traffic is growing meaningfully for the first time. The numbers are still small, but here is one encouraging chart:

This is the fraction of enduser traffic to Google.com that is IPv6 ready. The chart shows that it’s still tiny but now approaching 1% and growing rapidly.

What is especially encouraging in the study is how much of DNS already supports the AAAA record which provides the IPv6 address. The study finds that 89% of active DNS resolvers already look for it. Yet so far only 0.16% of .com and 0.84% of .net addresses have an AAAA entry. That goes up to 3% among the Alexa top 10K sites (would be interesting to know for the Alex top 100 – someone should run that).

So I think two things could further help IPv6 adoption. First is for anyone whose servers and service support it is to start adding AAAA records. Second, is to make end users aware of whether they have an IPv6 address from their ISP or not and why that matters. This post is already getting a bit long, so I am going to write about why that matters in a separate post (hint: it’s not just the IPv4 address crunch).