Netherlands may be cutting its IPv6 deficit

According to Google data, IPv6 adoption continues at a steady pace. The modern protocol is now used by just under 30 per cent of people accessing Google services. Monitoring by AMS-IX also shows continued growth in IPv6 traffic.

Growth plateaus

Broadly speaking, Facebook's published statistics reveal a similar picture. However, their numbers suggest that growth in global IPv6 use plateaued last year. We highlighted the same trend change in an earlier article. We also reported on a couple of initiatives designed to promote IPv6 adoption: signing of the IPv6 Statement of Intent by various government bodies, vendors and service providers, and our own IPv6 workshops.

Now Facebook's stats for the Netherlands present a picture at odds with the global landscape. Dutch IPv6 adoption seems to have accelerated in the last six months. We're hopeful that this is the first sign that the reported efforts to encourage IPv6 use are bearing fruit.

Playing catch-up

If the Netherlands is starting to catch up, it's not a moment too soon. We've frequently reported how poor the country's rate of IPv6 adoption has been in comparison with neighbouring countries [1, 2]. What's more, there's absolutely no IPv4 address space left [1, 2, 3]. According to Google, user-side IPv6 use in the Netherlands is now 26 per cent. As the KPN and Ziggo/Vodafone network data presented below corroborate, that figure is twice what it was a year ago. However, the countries around us have of course been making progress as well. Consequently, we remain a long way behind, as will be clear from the Google-compiled map below and the associated table. Belgium and Germany are doing particularly well, with adoption rates of 57 and 50 per cent, respectively. Indeed, both those countries are amongst the global leaders.

Interestingly, ten years ago the Netherlands had more IPv6 Autonomous Systems than any other country in the world. This animation by RIPE NCC shows how we've slipped down the ranking in years since, overtaken by one country after another, mainly because there was so little adoption in the Netherlands.

Debogonisation

RIPE NCC also reported recently that it had started assigning IPv6 blocks from the new 2a10::/12 address space. We wrote last summer about IANA's allocation of that prefix to RIPE NCC. The RIR has used the intervening months to verify that routing of the new address space is functioning properly. Known as 'debogonisation', the test procedure involved investigating how much traffic was 'spontaneously' sent to the address space as a whole, whether route information was correctly propagated, and whether test addresses could be reached by pinging. Having confirmed that all was well, RIPE NCC started bringing the new address space into use.

No failure

In this blog post, network specialist Iljitsch van Beijnum describes the progress of IPv6 adoption over the last decade. In a second post, he also expresses satisfaction with the current situation: with deployment now exceeding 25 per cent, you can already say that IPv6 isn't a failure. According to Van Beijnum, there is little technical difference between IPv4 and IPv6, and the shortage of IPv4 addresses is the only reason for switching to IPv6. After all, he argues, everything is available on the IPv4 network, whereas only a quarter of the internet's content is available on the IPv6 network. Van Beijnum asserts that IPv6 implementation is commercially justified only if the shortage of IPv4 addresses causes problems even after deploying workarounds such as NAT and CGNAT. "It's hard to avoid the conclusion that the internet is going to remain a dual-stack network for some time to come," says Van Beijnum. "So we're going to have to come to terms with the resultant complexities."

Push

Van Beijnum expects that the next push for IPv6 will come from big telecoms firms and access providers who have large numbers of IPv6-only service users. The traffic from such users to IPv4-only providers requires translation by NAT64 gateways – and that implies enormous processing power, especially where multimedia content is concerned. Telecoms firms and access providers are therefore likely to press content providers to use IPv6-enabled systems.