Akamai recently published its third quarterly report for 2015 on ‘The State of the Internet‘. As a major content delivery network provider, Akamai is able to collate substantial amounts of data on many metrics including connection speeds, network availability, traffic patterns, and IPv6 adoption.
Whilst the number of unique IPv4 addresses connecting to Akamai continues to increase, there’s substantial evidence this trend is starting to level off as available IPv4 addresses become more scarce. Indeed, the statistics for IPv4 show small declines in some countries like the US, Germany and India which suggests implementation of IPv4 conservation measures such as Carrier Grade NAT, or increased IPv6 adoption.
Belgium remains the country with the highest percentage (34%) of content requests made over IPv6, despite a 8.4% quarterly drop. Switzerland, the United States, Peru and Germany follow with between 17 and 20% traffic, although with the exception of Peru, all saw a decrease from the previous quarter. On the upside, Greece and Estonia saw a sizeable increases in their IPv6 traffic with 37% and 20% respectively.
Cable and mobile providers continue to push IPv6, particularly in the US (Comcast Cable, AT&T, Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile and Time Warner Cable), Belgium (TELENET), Peru (Telefonica del Peru), Switzerland (Swisscom), Germany (Deutsche Telekom and Kabel Deutschland) and Portugal (Sapo). BT has also announced plans to IPv6 enable 100% of its UK network by the end of 2016.
Finally, the report notes that ARIN exhausted its pool of IPv4 addresses in July 2015 and was forced to wait list thirteen requests until it received additional address space from IANA and recovered addresses from other organisations. Whilst the other Regional Internet Registries do still have address space remaining, the substantial transfer activity during the quarter suggests that organisations are increasingly concerned about the availability of address and were taking action to ensure continuity of their business.
It’s clear that organisations really do now need to be actively deploying IPv6, so please take a look at our Start Here page to understand how you can get started transitioning your networks, devices and applications!