To help tell the story of what happened with the beginning of World IPv6 Launch on June 6, 2012, we created this infographic that explains through both numbers and charts how the Internet changed – and is continuing to change!
Please feel free to pass the image along or to use it in your materials – and to point people here to this page www.worldipv6launch.org/infographic to download a copy themselves.
Thank you to all of you who are part of these amazing numbers – and we look forward to seeing the continued growth of IPv6 in the months and years ahead.
(Click on the image below to view the infographic in a separate window.)
We’ve published network operator measurement results from World IPv6 Launch here. These results show some networks carrying impressive percentages of IPv6 traffic. The results are ranked by volume of traffic measured by Google. The percentages are a simple average of measurement results from multiple sources. Our measurement sources are Google, Yahoo! and Facebook and we have published results for all network operator participants for which we have at least two measurement sources and for which the simple average of those measurements is greater than 0.1%.
Folks interested in the measurement methodologies used by our sources should read on.
Google: We measure IPv6 adoption among Google users by adding measurement JavaScript to a random sample of visits to various Google properties. The methodology is similar to that described in our paper, Evaluating IPv6 adoption in the Internet. The JavaScript uses HTTP to fetch a URL from an IPv4-only hostname and a URL from a dual-stack hostname, in random order, and then reports the results. The measurement is attributed to the ASN that originates the user’s IPv4 address. Measurement endpoints use the same infrastructure that serve regular Google traffic.
Facebook: On June 6th, we examined page loads from randomly selected users. For each user we are able to test if they are using IPv6 to communicate with Facebook. We also know which ISP (World IPv6 Launch participant) they are using at their location. After collecting all data for June 6th, we calculated the percent of unique IPv6 users out of total unique users we saw from each ISP. Many millions of page loads were in our 24-hour data capture for these statistics.
Yahoo!: Yahoo!’s data is based on a sample of the user population hitting our “Front Page” sites (such as www.yahoo.com, ca.yahoo.com, etc). The percentage of IPv6 users is determined by an invisible image on the page being loaded from a dual stack (IPv4+IPv6) web server; the web server logs whether IPv4 or IPv6 was used. Each user selected for measuring IPv6 will only run this test to completion once per 24 hours, per browser session. We considered any ISP with more than 1000 users (extrapolated from sample set) to be measurable; we additionally considered any ISP with significant IPv4 users to be measurable.
Now is the time to offer a huge congratulations and thanks to all the organizations that committed to IPv6 deployment, as part of today’s World IPv6 Launch or simply because it’s the Right Thing for the Internet!
Today represents a significant milestone for IPv6 deployment as we put to bed rumours and myths that IPv6 was somehow undeployable or unusable in a production environment, as we see thousands of organizations turning it up in their production services. Let’s review:
Over 60 access networks around the world are offering IPv6 as part of their standard Internet connectivity offering, and they are showing tangible IPv6 traffic. This isn’t just promises, it is reality.
Over 3,000 websites, including the top-referenced ones from around the globe, have turned IPv6 on for their main site, and they are leaving it on. For good.
Hardware manufacturers are enabling IPv6 (set to “on”, by default) in their home router equipment lines.
These are organizations that have thoroughly researched the implications of IPv6 deployment, and thoughtfully worked out their deployment plans — as part of their production services. And, it goes beyond IPv6 for websites: companies are deploying it where it matters for their business.
For those of us who have been participating in technology development and deployment on the Internet for a while, it’s pretty thrilling to see that organizations can still come together as a community, to collaboratively step up to doing the right thing. This is a key element of what makes the Internet so successful — it is what we build it to be.
In a few days, we’ll have more detail from measurements made through the first 24 hours of IPv6 Launch. In the meantime, you can get a taste of how the world looks now, with expected “up and to the right” graphs:
Informally, we’ve known that many more organizations are working to get IPv6 deployed. Nominum has done a survey that captures the commitment in numbers — http://www.nominum.com/press-release/nominum-ipv6-survey . There are significant IPv6 deployment plans on every continent.
Today is just the beginning — the Future is Forever!
