IPv6 Day only a beginning, researchers say

IDG News Service - World IPv6 Day boosted the amount of native IPv6 traffic on the Internet, but it mostly increased the use of transitional protocols that won't help to solve the looming shortage of IPv4 addresses, according to researchers studying data from Wednesday's event.

The 24-hour experiment was a trial run for the next generation of Internet Protocol, which offers far more potential addresses than the current version, IPv4. More than a thousand Web pages, including ones at Google, Facebook, Yahoo and other major destinations, temporarily were made available over both IPv6 and IPv4. The event was designed to test how well client, server and network components performed when making connections over IPv6.

In fact, the day was less a test of IPv6 and more of the technologies to be used on the way to the day when IPv4 goes away. But those transitional tools are important to try out, because they are likely to come into play for many users and enterprises in the coming years.

For a user to reach a website over IPv6, there has to be an IPv6 address provided for the site and the client system has to be able to recognize and go to that address. Major participants and the Internet Society, which organized World IPv6 Day, reported that few problems arose as users went to the IPv6 versions of pages.

However, most of the additional traffic on Wednesday didn't use IPv6, but rather a variety of protocols designed to allow IPv6 to coexist with networks dominated by IPv4. In most cases the transitional protocols don't help to solve the problem of quickly dwindling IPv4 addresses, according to IPv6 consultant Craig Labovitz, the former chief scientist at Arbor Networks. While this result did not surprise researchers, it signaled that the journey toward IPv6 is just beginning.

Even during the event, IPv6 and related protocols made up only a small portion of the traffic on the Internet. Before the event began at midnight UTC on Wednesday, that share was only 0.135 percent, according to tests by Sandvine, a network equipment maker. During the test, the proportion grew to 0.15 percent, Sandvine said. Others who compiled numbers found different results, because they were measuring different portions of the Internet.

The biggest growth was in transitional protocols, Sandvine reported. Both before and during the test, most of this traffic used the Teredo protocol. Teredo made up 80 percent of IPv6-related traffic before World IPv6 Day and 77 percent during the event, the company said.

Teredo is one of a handful of protocols used to help IPv6 packets traverse IPv4 networks. Others include 6to4 and 6in4. They use tunneling techniques, such as encapsulating IPv6 packets in IPv4 packets, to get through the routers and other equipment on a network that don't support the new protocol. For example, U.S. cable operator Comcast is introducing dual-stack services, which support both versions of IP, but hasn't yet rolled them out to all its subscribers. Those who don't have the full dual-stack services have to use a transitional protocol to reach an IPv6 resource, according to Scott Iekel-Johnson, a current product manager at Arbor, which provides network security software to Comcast.