NTIA Interest in IPv6 Adoption Comes Amid Exponential US Deployment Increase

U.S. entities’ progress over the past year in adopting IPv6 makes NTIA’s recent request for comment on factors influencing adoption of the protocol particularly opportune amid the inflection point in the transition to new technologies like 5G and the IoT, officials said in interviews. NTIA said last week it’s particularly interested in feedback from firms that have adopted IPv6 on the “benefits, costs and challenges they have experienced, as well as any insight into additional incentives that could aid future adoption, implementation, and support of IPv6” (see 1608180029). The Internet Engineering Task Force developed IPv6, which uses longer Internet Protocol addresses, to succeed IPv4 as the number of that protocol's addresses dwindled. The switch to IPv6 has been seen as increasingly necessary as the number of connected devices has increased, particularly due to the IoT.

Multiple measurements of IPv6 use globally show adoption of the protocol has increased over the past year, though significant progress is still needed, officials told us. Google said 13 percent of all users accessing the search engine the week of Aug. 21 did so over IPv6, compared with just over 8 percent of users during the same period in 2015. Akamai and Cisco both ranked the U.S. fifth among independent countries for IPv6 adoption. Akamai said the U.S. had a 20.5 percent adoption rate as of mid-July. Cisco found a 44.4 percent deployment rate as of Monday based on measurements of IPv6 use in networks, content distribution and users with IPv6 addresses. Google found a 28.7 percent adoption rate as of Monday.

Statistics show adoption has “gotten over the hump and now we’re finally beginning to see an exponential increase,” said ICANN Chief Technology Officer David Conrad. “We’re starting to see the cost of deploying IPv6 is becoming increasingly lower than the cost of acquiring new IPv4 addresses.” Available IPv4 address pools have been exhausted in all regional internet registries except the African Network Information Center (see 1509290069), leading to a burgeoning secondary market of address brokers, Conrad told us. “It’s an interesting evolution from an IPv4 management environment that was needs based to one that is governed by supply and demand.”

The U.S.’ relatively high rate of adoption in comparison with the rest of the world is attributable in part to the willingness of major U.S. ISPs like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon to be aggressive in deploying the protocol, Conrad said. Akamai ranks those three ISPs and Time Warner Cable (part of Charter Communications) as the top four network adopters of IPv6. T-Mobile ranks No. 6, and Cox Communications No. 8 in Akamai’s report, which ranks the networks based on the volume of requests to Akamai from IPv6 addresses associated with those networks. The Internet Society-sponsored World IPv6 Launch ranks Comcast and AT&T as the top two IPv6 adopting networks based on traffic volume, with Verizon ranked No. 4 and TWC ranked No. 5.

Internet Society Technology Program Manager Mat Ford also noted an increase in major U.S. providers’ implementation of IPv6 in recent years, with U.S. mobile networks’ deployment of IPv6 increasing significantly recently. Some major U.S. network operators made the transition because it’s now “impractical” to manage the number of devices being used on their networks using IPv4, he said. Some mobile network operators “realized that using network address translation doesn’t scale very well for the volume of traffic and the number of subscribers they’ve got,” Ford said. Growth of content providers’ use of the protocol is “more mixed” given that major providers have been IPv6-capable for a while, he said.

U.S. increase in IPv6 adoption is at least partially driven by shifts in the cost of making system upgrades required for use of the protocol relative to the cost of secondary market IPv4 purchases, though some entities still see the secondary market as more cost effective, said David Belson, Akamai industry and data intelligence senior director. IPv6 Forum President Latif Ladid told us he attributes the U.S.’ advancement partly to high IPv6 penetration on mobile networks. Apple is helping to increase adoption via its May request to app developers to begin deploying only IPv6-capable versions of new app versions or updates, Ladid said.

NTIA’s interest in gathering information on current factors influencing IPv6 adoption with the U.S. is a natural extension of the U.S. government’s long-standing interest in promoting the protocol’s deployment, Ladid said. The federal government “has been very keen on utilizing” IPv6 to its fullest potential as a way of improving infrastructure, including the government’s 2012 road map for requiring all federal agencies to support IPv6 on their websites, Ladid said. The feedback NTIA collects in its request for comment undoubtedly will help it better promote adoption both domestically and globally, he said.

The agency shouldn’t see its request for comment as an opportunity to “necessarily get involved in setting IPv6 adoption policy” because “that would be met with a lot of backlash,” Belson said. He said the U.S. government’s internal IPv6 adoption road map has been difficult to implement because agencies made deployment progress at different rates. NTIA “can look at the current situation and make recommendations for promoting adoption but they should continue their historic policy of staying away from specifying protocol use” outside federal systems, Belson said.

The request for comment also could give the agency an opportunity to help stakeholders to formulate a transition plan to IPv6 along the same lines as the federal government’s encouragement of task forces to mitigate possible effects of the Year 2000/Y2K computer programming bug ahead of its anticipated 2000 onset, Ladid said. The object shouldn’t be to cause the same public panic over an IPv6 transition as existed in planning for Y2K, but the “approach should be the same,” he said. Akamai also examined treating its IPv6 migration the same way it addressed Y2K mitigation by making it a board-level topic and regularly reporting transition progress to stakeholders, Belson said.