IPv6 Rollout Gains Traction as IPv4 Addresses Become Pricier

Six years after world IPv6 launch, the technology is in the "early majority" phase, said the Internet Society and others tracking rollout this week. The longer addresses are increasingly used by telcos, mobile operators, content networks and data centers, but deployment is being delayed by factors like the "elephant in the room" -- enterprise networks, ISOC reported. One issue has been the lack of a viable business case, but that's changing as IPv4 Internet Protocol addresses become more expensive, observers said.

Deploying "is not that simple," IPv6 Forum President Latif Ladid emailed: It takes some network rearchitecturing, some best practice skills and some investment. "Crossing the overall 50% [take-up level] lies in the hands of the enterprise world." Only a few big internet companies such as Google and Facebook "understand the real but hidden benefits of IPv6, while the majority of enterprises are just simple users of the Internet and these would need some serious hands-on experience and guidance to do it properly," he said.

The advent of 5G "will be a game changer," Ladid said. Some strategic ISPs have decided to use IPv6-only for 5G, he noted. Indian mobile operator Reliance Jio and T-Mobile in the U.S. are among the majority of mobile providers that deployed 4G services with IPv6, he said.

Over 25 percent of all internet-connected networks now advertise IPv6 connectivity, ISOC said. It cited Google reports showing 49 countries deliver more than 5 percent of traffic over the technology, with new countries joining all the time. Major mobile networks are driving adoption in the U.S., Japan and India; Belgium is the first nation to regularly deliver more than 50 percent of traffic to key content providers over IPv6, the society said. All operators of top-level domain names use dual stacking (providing IPv4 and IPv6 addresses), and over 98 percent of the 1,543 top-level domain names have IPv6 name server addresses and can be queried via either format, it said.

The U.K. had "minimal" IPv6 deployment in 2012, with only around 0.2 percent of internet users having access to it, the U.K. IPv6 Council said. It's seventh in the IPv6 adoption table now, it said. Deployment was pushed by British Sky Broadcasting, which started full-scale customer rollout in 2016 and now offers IPv6 to 98 percent of subscribers, it said; ISPs such as British Telecom and Virgin Media will drive the next wave of IPv6 growth.

Enterprise operations "tend to be the 'elephant in the room'" for deployment, ISOC said. Enterprise networks are likely to have the lowest rate of deployment, though "larger and more tech-savvy" companies such as Microsoft are making the shift, it said. More movement will be needed on the network side in the long run, such as in smaller ISPs and corporate networks, to keep global adoption going, Akamai Chief Architect Erik Nygren blogged. Web-hosting companies "have a crucial role to play in the transition" but "remain one of the chief bottlenecks," telecom regulator ARCEP (Autorité de régulation des communications électroniques et des postes) said in a non-finalized translation given to us of a report on the internet in France (to be published here). IPv6 protocol won't function end to end unless all of the links along the chain are involved, it said.

By 2018, the rationale for using IPv6 had "changed in an interesting way," the U.K. IPv6 Council, going from being a subject for the technical community to catching the attention of finance people in organizations worldwide. Since the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority allocated the last of the unused IPv4 addresses in 2011, the price of one has slowly risen, driving companies to explore IPv6-only deployment, it said.

IPv4 is increasingly "an unnecessary cost, and a speculative asset," ISOC said. An organization faced with buying the older addresses "has reason to ask whether the expense is worth the value. The short answer is that it increasingly is not." It urged companies to sell IPv4 addresses and use the money to fund IPv6 deployment, connecting to an upstream ISP that will use translation mechanisms to connect to any remaining IPv4-only content. Between the cost of acquiring IPv4 addresses and the complexity of running a dual-stack network with IPv4 and IPv6 as equivalents, "it is becoming increasingly attractive for network operators to run 'IPv4-as-a-service' (IPv4aaS) over IPv6, Akamai's Nygren said.

Three main "blockers" to take-up mean the technology is a long way from being on many companies' radar, Erion Ltd IPv6 consultant David Holder blogged for regional internet registry RIPE NCC (Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre). One concern is "why should we fix something that is not broken?" He said some companies say they have no budget for IPv6; others believe moving would mean losing the benefits of a particular form of network address translation for load-balancing and resilience. Businesses must stop thinking of IPv4 as the current version of IP and IPv6 as a secondary, less important protocol, Holder said. "We, and others, need to believe that IPv6 is the current version of the Internet protocol and that IPv4 is a legacy protocol, inferior, broken and deteriorating."