[LINK] IPv6 going backwards - World IPv6 Day

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

IPv6 traffic volumes going backwards

By Stuart Corner Wednesday, 20 April 2011 12:33
<http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/networking/46689-ipv6-traffic-
volumes-going-backwards>

    
With the long expected exhaustion of IPv4 addresses now a reality, in 
Asia Pacific at least, you'd expect the volume of Internet traffic using 
IPv6 addressing to be growing strongly, but it has in fact decreased in 
the last six months.

Arbor Networks conducted what it said was "one of the first studies of 
native IPv6 traffic volumes across multiple large carriers" in late 2010 
and early 2011 in order to provide a benchmark against which to assess 
the impact of the World IPv6 Day planned for June 8.

In a report of that study, Arbor Networks' chief scientist, Craig 
Labovitz, said: "During the six month study period, IPv4 inter-domain 
traffic grew by an average of 40-60 percent. 

In marked contrast, IPv6 (both native and tunnelled) decreased by an 
average 12 percent, though the small volumes of native IPv6 more than 
doubled."

And the volume of IPv6 traffic, tunnelled or native, remains miniscule in 
comparison to IPv4. 

Labovitz said: "After peaking at 0.04 percent of all Internet traffic in 
August 2010, tunnelled v6 declined significantly through February 2011. 

Possible explanations for this percentage decline in migration of 
tunnelled IPv6 to native traffic and more efficient deployment of tunnels 
and encapsulation technology… 

Overall, aggregate v6 volumes remained mostly constant over the study 
period between 0.1 and 0.2 percent of Internet traffic."

The study measured traffic through six large North American and European 
service providers that have deployed Arbor's Active Threat Level Analysis 
System (ATLAS), claimed to be the world's first globally scoped threat 
analysis network. It is based on Arbor Networks Peakflow AP anomaly 
detection platform that is installed in 70 percent of the world's service 
provider networks and monitors 80 percent of global Internet traffic, 
according to Arbor.

Arbor also made a breakdown of IPv6 traffic by application. 

Labovitz said: "We look at the top IPv6 applications in the six 
participating ATLAS deployments with native IPv6 telemetry. 

Not surprisingly, P2P [peer to peer] continues to dominate at more than 
60 percent of all IPv6 traffic..At a distant second and third, Web and 
SSH both average 4.6 percent of IPv6 traffic…As a point of comparison, 
our ongoing analysis of IPv4 application traffic finds video (Netflix, 
YouTube, Flash) at a combined 40 percent and P2P representing only eight 
percent of IPv4."

World IPv6 Day is aimed at stimulating uptake of IPv6. According to 
Labovitz, on World IPv6 Day, "In a remarkable, first-of-a-kind global 
experiment...an Internet wide consortium of major carriers, vendors and 
content providers…will conduct the first global-scale trial of IPv6 with 
major content players including Google, Akamai and Limelight enabling 
native v6 on their servers…Providers around the world will enable IPv6 by 
default on most of the most popular Internet web sites and services use 
by hundreds of millions of consumers."

Labovitz said: "A major goal of World IPv6 day is the collection of 
Internet-wide IPv6 measurements and identifying major v6 connectivity and 
performance problems…Will the flood of IPv6 traffic result in network 
failures? Will operators and vendors discover new bugs in network 
infrastructure? We do not know will happen – that is why this V6 day 
experiment is so crucial."

He concluded: "Vendors and providers have spent years updating technology 
and testing IPv6 to ensure June 8th will go seamlessly. If all goes well, 
the vast majority of users will spend the day unawares of this global 
Internet infrastructure experiment."

This article first appeared in ExchangeDaily, iTWire's daily newsletter 
for telecommunications professionals. 

--

Cheers,
Stephen