How Did Estonia Grow From Near 0% IPv6 To 8% In 7 Months?

How did the country of Estonia grow from close to 0% IPv6 deployment to almost 8% in about 7 months?  What did the network operators there do?  By way of a tweet today we learned that RIPE Labs published this great IPv6 case study about the Estonian growth. The story also includes this impressive chart from Akamai’s State of the Internet report:

That shows the growth of IPv6 usage through March 2015 – and today Google’s IPv6 statistics put Estonian usage at 7.75% (as of June 2, 2015) and APNIC’s IPv6 stats show the country hitting over 8% in late May 2015:

Sooo… how did they do this?

Well, we should really direct you to the APNIC Labs guest post from Tarko Tikan of Estonian Telecom:

• IPv6 Deployment in Estonia

and also his recent presentation, “Enabling and Securing IPv6 in Service Provider Networks “:

A couple of high-level points I took away from the material:

• They did not try to justify the IPv6 deployment on its own – instead they folded it into a planned project to replace their broadband network gateway (BNG).
• They made sure they had a fall-back mechanism in place so that customers would not notice any issues with IPv6.
• They paid a great amount of attention to the customer premises equipment (CPE) and rolled out IPv6-capable CPE in advance of the deployment.
• They used access control lists (ACLs) to be able to limit and then quickly open up IPv6 deployment to different parts of their network.

Tarko provides some great statistics in his APNIC post:

As for the statistics, we have a total of 250,000 subscribers in our network. We have 38,000+ active IPv6 subscribers (almost 15% of our customer base). Eighty-one percent of these have at least one IPv6-enabled device in the LAN and 70% have more than one.

Again, the article and video provide more information.  Kudos to APNIC Labs for publishing it and for Tarko Tikan for providing the information.

If you want to get your network operating with IPv6, please visit our Start Here page to begin! Consider joining Estonian Telecom and the many other service providers who have made the move to IPv6!

P.S. If you are network operator and enable IPv6, why not join the World IPv6 Launch measurements effort so that your network will appear in our monthly IPv6 measurements?