IPv6 Launch Day aimed to accelerate global IPv6 adoption by encouraging sites around the world to turn IPv6 on and leave it on. The Launch Day event was the Internet Society’s second yearly event for IPv6, following IPv6 Day in 2011. 2013 sees no IPv6 Day event, but that doesn’t mean the job of moving the world to IPv6 is done.
Phil Roberts, technology program manager at the Internet Society, told Enterprise Networking Planet that the Internet Society never planned to always hold an annual IPv6 Day event. That doesn’t mean that the message is one that should stop being told, though.
IPv4 address space was officially depleted in February of 2011, though that doesn’t mean IPv4 is dead. The exhaustion simply means that Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) can no longer get any net new IPv4 address space from IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority
). IPv6 and IPv4 address space will coexist for many years to come.
The volume of traffic going over IPv6 in 2013 is still small, but it is growing. Google is currently reporting that 1.27 percent of its traffic comes in over IPv6.
Cisco is currently forecasting that for 2013, 3.1 percent of total IP traffic will be IPv6, up from 1.3 percent at the end of 2012. By the end of 2017, 23.9 percent of IP traffic will be IPv6.
Read the full story at Enterprise Networking Planet:
IPv6 Launch Day – One Year Later
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.