IPv6 Rollout Said Showing Healthy Growth, but Resistance Remains

Four percent may not sound like much, but that’s 4 percent of the planet who access Google, so ISOC believes IPv6 will continue to grow, Roberts said. Four percent of the Internet population is “huge,” said Fiocco in an interview. That percentage exists only in a small group of countries that includes the U.S., Germany, Belgium and a few others, he said. But considering that they will be the blueprint for other nations, the take-up from around 1 percent 18 months ago to 4 percent now shows impressive growth, Fiocco said. Around 20 million U.S. households are on IPv6, 6 million in Germany, he said. In Belgium, all fixed-line providers enable IPv6 by default, and now 25 percent of connections are carried over it, he said.

The quiet on the IPv6 front is the “silence before the storm,” said Veronika McKillop, who chairs the newly created U.K. IPv6 Council. McKillop, a Cisco systems engineer, said she has started getting many more questions over the past year about IPv6 from a range of organizations in the private and public sectors. British culture is such that people don’t shout about what they're doing until the work is done, but there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes activity, she said. Many network providers are preparing to provide the technology, including Council members British Telecom, BSkyB and Virgin Media, she said in an interview.

The U.K. IPv6 Council was created as part of the IPv6 Forum to spur take-up in Britain, McKillop said. It aims to foster an environment in which the business and technical communities can share information, experience with and business cases/drivers for IPv6 deployment. McKillop said she also wants to work with organizations such as TechUK, the British Computer Society and the U.K. government to counter the negative perception in the IPv6 arena. The council will officially launch after the summer, and its first discussion will focus on the business cases and drivers for IPv6, she said. Google’s IPv6 tracker showed U.K. adoption at 0.16 percent as of Aug. 8.

'Under the Radar'

There are still issues with IPv6 deployment, said those we interviewed. There’s little news about IPv6 because most deployments are by service providers for their customers, and they don’t talk about it much to the public, said Fiocco. They're deploying “under the radar” because there’s no marketable value to IPv6, he said.

It’s worrying that these service providers aren’t talking about the transition to enterprises such as banks and other customer-facing companies, Fiocco said. Those content providers don’t know about the technology and aren’t enabling it for their own end-users, a substantial proportion of which have IPv6 capability and are getting degraded IPv4 services, he said. The only content most users get is from global companies such as Google and Facebook, but that accounts for only about 50 percent of the content available from any given European country, he said. The IPv6 community must do a better job of addressing the business community -- banks, manufacturers, e-commerce companies and so forth, he said.

The business case for IPv6 is often difficult because there’s not a great deal of experience with it and people are resistant to learning an unknown and taking risks, McKillop said. Once organizations review the technology properly they realize it’s not that hard, she said. Many companies have been using network address translation (NAT), are aware of the issues involved in layering NAT after NAT and take it as a “necessary evil,” she said. But because NATs are “habit,” organizations are afraid to move to the unknown IPv6, she said. Additionally, many don’t see IPv6 as critical because they still have connectivity using IPv4 with NAT, she said. But once they start trying to do business with, for example, businesses in Asia that are IPv6-enabled, they'll see the need for the newer technology, she said.

Three areas still need attention, said Roberts. Mobile operators mostly haven’t adopted IPv6, with Verizon and T-Mobile the only U.S. companies to do so, he said. As smartphones and apps proliferate and mobile networks roll out, more will be IPv6-enabled, he said. In some places, IPv6 is being deployed by operators that want to innovate, such as Verizon and T-Mobile USA, Fiocco said. European incumbents, with the exception of Deutsche Telekom and Swisscom, are “clearly not in that mindset,” he said.

Another problem is getting the technology in all devices in homes, Roberts said. Comcast may have IPv6 turned on across its entire footprint, but not all of the traffic coming out of those homes uses it, he said. Many older home routers and other products aren’t IPv6-enabled, and this barrier affects everything, regardless of whether a particular operator has enabled the technology or not. Finally, pervasive deployment will come later as enterprises adopt IPv6, Roberts said. Companies aren’t making it a priority, he added.

The “prime handicap is lack of v6 hands-on skills on site,” IPv6 Forum Chairman Latif Ladid told us. The upgrade can be done at the lowest cost when staffers have the necessary skills, he said. If they don’t, it’s perceived as a very expensive upgrade, he said. If ISPs offered IPv6, “then you have immediately 100%” take-up, he said in an email.

Another argument, which Fiocco called somewhat “false,” is that service providers would have to make significant infrastructure changes to enable IPv6 by default. Companies update their infrastructure all the time, and some have decided to make IPv6 the default technology while they're upgrading, he said. IPv6 isn’t generally a capital expense, but it costs money for operating expenses, staff training and other items, he said.