Over the next 36 months or so talk about IPv6 is likely to hit a feverish pitch as IPv4 addresses are finally exhausted. As such, it makes sense to try and figure who is leading in the race towards IPv6 adoption and who is lagging behind. ICANN staffer Leo Vegoda has made an interesting case for Africa being a leader in IPv6.
Vegoda notes that actually finding a valid metric for figuring out how much IPv6 is being used in a given region is a difficult task.
“One possible measure of IPv6 deployment in ISPs is the number of IPv6
address blocks (prefixes) seen in the routing table in comparison with
the the number of autonomous systems (ASs – roughly equivalent to ISPs)
in a region,” Vegoda blogged. “AfriNIC, the Regional Internet
Registry for Africa and parts of the Indian Ocean, has a higher
proportion of networks in its region announcing IPv6 addresses than the
others.”
First of all I think it’s great that Africa is right up there on the uptake of IPv6. It’s a measure of the fact that Africa doesn’t have as much ‘legacy’ IPv4 to deal with and not as many IP’s in general to deal with.
However I don’t think it’s an accurate assessment to say that Africa currently leads the world in IPv6. It’s very difficult to measure IPv6 (as Vegoda notes) because there is traffic that is tunneled (IPv6 over IPv4) as well as native traffic. Personally I would strongly suspect that due to the recent OMB mandate in the US Government for IPv6 compliance that the US governement is in a very strong position when it comes to IPv6. Certainly the US has not ‘turned on’ IPv6 as its default, but the installed capability is there when the time comes.
