IPv6 Deployment

IPv6 Deployment

Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) is the next generation of the Internet Protocol that is in various stages of deployment on the Internet. It was designed as a replacement for the current version, IPv4, that has been in use since 1982 and is in the final stages of exhausting its unallocated address space.

In December 2008, despite marking its 10th anniversary as a Standards Track protocol, IPv6 still accounted for a minuscule fraction of the used addresses and the traffic in the publicly accessible Internet which is still dominated by IPv4. A study by Google, reported in November 2008, indicated that penetration was still less than one percent of Internet traffic in any country. The leaders were Russia (0.76%), France (0.65%), Ukraine (0.64%), Norway (0.49%), and the United States (0.45%). Although Asia led in terms of absolute deployment numbers, the relative penetration was smaller (e.g., China: 0.24%).

In October 2011, 263 (85%) of the 294 top-level domains (TLDs) in the Internet supported IPv6 to access their domain name servers, and 234 (76%) zones contained IPv6 glue records, and approximately 3.4 million domains (3%) had IPv6 address records in their zones. Of all networks in the global BGP routing table, 12% have IPv6 protocol support.

By 2011 all major operating systems in use on personal computers and server systems had production-quality IPv6 implementations. Microsoft Windows has supported IPv6 since Windows 2000, and in production-ready state beginning with Windows XP. Windows Vista and later have improved IPv6 support. Mac OS X Panther (10.3), Linux 2.6, FreeBSD, and Solaris also have mature production implementations. Some implementations of the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file transfer protocol make use of IPv6 to avoid NAT issues common for IPv4 private networks.

Cellular telephone systems present a large deployment field for Internet Protocol devices as mobile telephone service is making the transition from 3G to "next-generation" 4G technologies, in which voice is provisioned as a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service. This mandates the use of IPv6 for such networks. In 2009 U.S. cellular operator Verizon released technical specifications for devices to operate on its "next-generation" networks. The specification mandates IPv6 operation according to the 3GPP Release 8 Specifications (March 2009), and deprecates IPv4 as an optional capability.

In the early 2000s, governments increasingly required support for IPv6 in new equipment. The U.S. government, for example, specified in 2005 that the network backbones of all federal agencies had to be upgraded to IPv6 by June 30, 2008; this was completed before the deadline. The government of People's Republic of China implemented a five-year plan for deployment of IPv6 called the China Next Generation Internet (see below).

Major providers of Internet services, both ISPs and content providers, also began to implement IPv6 access into their products.