While a bit cliche, the last days of each year are a good opportunity to reflect on the year – progress made, problems solved, insights gained – and to look towards those same things for the upcoming year.
2012 saw Google measuring IPv6 traffic clearing over 1% of overall traffic – while 1% is still too low, check the chart. The phrase “hockey stick” comes to mind – it will be very interesting to see if this exponential growth trend continues (or accelerates).
2012 saw “World IPv6 Launch” happen, a very successful follow-up to “World IPv6 Day” in 2011. ”This time it is for real”, meaning not just a 24 hour light-up of some Ipv6-capable site; but a permanent light-up of IPv6 of your primary site. And getting ISPs to commit to lighting up some customers as well.
(Sidenote: I personally benefit from this in that Comcast has deployed native IPv6 in my service region. I have native IPv6 at my home; not because I ‘know someone’ and not because I configured a tunnel or loaded custom hacked-up firmware on my CPE. I have native IPv6 because my ISP supports it, my cable modem happens to be DOCSIS3.0 capable, my off-the-shelf CPE (Linksys 4200v2, if you must ask) does DHCPv6 and because all of the computing things in my house support it. Win!!)
2012 also saw the US federal government’s “OMB2012″ deadline come to pass. And while many agencies failed to meet it, many did (kudos to the Department of Veterans Affairs (va.gov) and even those that didn’t – hopefully they have started down the right path. A great guide to these requirements, and the now-on-deck 2014 deadline is available in the “Planning Guide/Roadmap Toward IPv6 Adoption within the U.S. Government”
In our view, 2012 is also the year when having an IPv6 presence on the Internet became An Important Thing. sadly, many environments that have taken this bold step often fail to maintain the same level of service, support and monitoring as their IPv4 offerings. To that end, we encourage the use of something like IPv6Sonar to monitor the status and performance of you site, over both IPv4 and IPv6.
Anecdotally, 2012 has also seen the training work continue to accelerate. This is a Good Thing, as understanding IPv6 is an important step in getting it deployed – and we have a long way to go in spreading this knowledge!
On the topic of sharing information, another pet peeve of mine: articles authored in such a way that they could easily be misunderdstood. For example, this article makes several valid points – but also raises points that require more clarification to avoid misunderstandings.
(Also, note that NAT-PT has officially been deprecated – DNS64/NAT64* is where it is at; (go read about that here and here!))
* – as a final aside: IPv6-only devices are something many have said will not happen in the near future, but clearly that is short-sighted and ignores one very important aspect for certain deployment scenarios. Such as my phone. In the interest of mitigating certain technical and economic impacts of dual-stacking cellular devices, my carrier** has elected to make IPv6-only an option for connecting to their network (and it is an option for now, the user needs to reconfigure the phone to do this). Naturally, I continue to need access to IPv4-only sites – and this happens via DNS64/NAT64!
** – OK, I lied. One more aside – while my carrier is doing this great work in getting IPv6-only devices deployed, note that their website is IPv4-only. That’s right, I actually need to use their DNS64/NAT64 implementation to get to their own website. Insert the “sad trombone” sound here …
And I close with a smile – feel free to take a minute (less, actually!) to watch our video about how you might approach your IPv6 training needs .
I hope you had a fantastic 2012, and are looking forward to an even more IPv6-enabled 2013!
/Your humble IPv6 servant