On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 10:00 AM, Scott Helms wrote:
Agreed, V4 traffic levels are likely to drop and stay at low levels for decades.
I seriously doubt v4 traffic is going to fall off a cliff. That would require IPv6 adoption on a large scale over a relatively short period.
The thing is that a very few networks account for a very large amount of traffic. So it depends on what you mean by "adoption on a large scale". <1% of the networks account for >50% of the traffic. If a handful of networks move to v6, then we have a very large amount of v6 traffic and a significant decrease in v4 traffic. It depends on if you mean large numbers of different endpoints or large numbers of packets when you say "adoption on a large scale". Joe's Fish Farm might and all the other Fish Farms might stay v4 for a decade or more but that traffic accounts for an insignificant portion of traffic in the context of internet traffic as a whole.
To date, nothing in the v6 verse has happened *quickly*. Replacement or software upgrades to millions of CPEs in hundreds of network is not something that will happen overnight.
What is the natural "churn" rate for CPE for one of the large MSOs? What portion of the MSOs have v6 capable CPE in place right now but v6 just isn't in use but is planned to go into v6 service soon? You don't need to migrate "hundreds" of networks to account for the majority of eyeball internet traffic in North America, you only need about five. It could be that v6 capable CPE has been in the process of being rolled out already and has been for months to possibly years.
Even then, that will not instantly switch everyone and every device to IPv6. How many "connected" devices do you think there are in the average home? TV? DVR (stb)? Game console(s)? Netflix streaming thing?
Ok, we have been watching our DNS servers for who is requesting AAAA records. The vast majority of our connections come from a very small number of networks. We are seeing requests for AAAA records. The next step is to put a v6 only DNS server into whois but hand out only A records for a while. But the idea is to see what of the requests for AAAA records actually arrive via IPv6. Once we profile that for a while, we will return AAAA records for the largest requester but only for requests arriving by IPv6 requesting AAAA records. The next step is to see that the requests actually result in connections to the service address handed out by the AAAA records and let that "bake" for a while and see if any service oddities are noticed. We happen to be in a unique position in that requests from different remote networks request a unique service address for that remote network and most others don't have that luxury. So if one remote network is v6 clean, we can change one IP address to AAAA records and "migrate" that remote network to v6 without impacting others simply by changing the DNS record for their service IP. If another network has issues, is requesting AAAA records but can't really talk over v6, we can roll back to A records for that service IP associated with that particular remote network. Other providers don't have that luxury and I understand that. But still, once two of those remote networks switch to v6, that is a very significant portion of our traffic. It will be possible, depending on which remote networks migrate and at what speed, for traffic to migrate in "chunks" as we migrate those AAAA records. We might go from 0% of traffic on v6 to 25% of traffic on v6 in less than a calendar quarter depending on the behavior of the remote nets. Also, once THEY see more successful traffic migration to v6, it gives impetus for them to move faster in that direction for additional services.
Facebook ... So that's 55% of Internet traffic right there.
and making a dent in it means residential transition. 50mil (or 83mil) devices is a lot of shit to replace or reprogram. Not to forget the thousands of devices that feed them.
Yes, and I mentioned that. So once you have >50% of the potential content sources v6 capable and >50% of the potential eyeballs v6 capable, you have potentially 25% of internet traffic on v6. And that can be done with the migration of enough networks to count on your fingers. So again, are we talking number of networks or number of packets when we say "large scale adoption"?
... mobile devices
i.e. cellphones... the two largest groups there (iPhone and Android) support IPv6 already. (in certain versions)
And are already being given native v6 IP addresses in some markets. Some markets are already doing NAT64 or something to get these devices to v4 content. George