In a census of .com, .net and .org domains, it turns out a handful of registrars were responsible for the majority of active IPv6 addresses, namely GoDaddy.
The
number of networks supporting the new IPv6 protocol has exploded this year,
thanks to a handful of large domain registrars, according to a recent Internet
"census."
A
little more than 25 percent of the Internet zones under .com, .net and .org
surveyed support IPv6, compared with a mere 1.27 percent a year ago, according
to an IPv6 census released Nov. 21. The survey, sponsored by Infoblox, found
that a handful of registrars are responsible for the growth in IPv6 traffic.
The
top three countries that have adopted IPv6 are France, the United States and
the Czech Republic. The growth in France and Czech Republic was driven by three
registrars alone, according to Cricket Liu, general manager of the Infoblox
IPv6 Center of Excellence.
The
significant increase is directly attributed to Go Daddy, which claims to be the
world's largest domain registrar. About 80 percent of active IPv6 addresses in
the survey are hosted by Go Daddy, the survey found. If Go Daddy's domains were
removed from the survey, the percentage of zones supporting IPv6 would plunge
to 3 percent. While that figure is still double what it was last year, Go Daddy
is the clear growth driver, Liu told
eWEEK.
Liu
called the results "beyond" any of his expectations. "We didn't
recognize that any one registrar could have that much impact," Liu said.
Liu
speculated that Go Daddy had likely decided to support IPv6 for its zones to
gain competitive advantage over other registrars. Other organizations will
likely respond and match Go Daddy's capabilities, which could drive next year's
survey results closer to 50 percent IPv6 support, Liu said.
IPv6
is the
next-generation
Internet protocol designed to be a successor for the current system, known
as IPv4, to determine the numeric addresses for each system. Demand for
Internet addresses has far outstripped supply thanks to the explosion of mobile
devices, smart devices and appliances that can access the Internet. IPv4 can
support 4.3 billion IPv4 addresses, and the last available blocks were
assigned
to the various regional authorities that assign IP addresses to
organizations in February 2011. Industry observers expect the Asia-Pacific
region, North America and Europe to run out of IPv4 addresses within the next
few months.
Registrars
adding IPv6 offerings is good news for customers looking to adopt the
next-generation protocol because it is all taken care of for them and would
require little to no work on their part, Liu said. Customers can use IPv6 as
one of the metrics to evaluate registrars, and switch providers if their existing
one doesn't have plans to offer the capability any time soon, according to Liu.
The
census scanned .com, .org and .net domains to find out which supported IPv6 and
discovered that the majority of IPv6 nodes are not Web and email servers. Since
many registrars run Web and mail servers for their customers, it is likely that
this number will increase over the next years as more registrars come on board
the IPv6 bandwagon, Liu said.
The
World
IPv6 Day in June was a one-day test in which participating organizations
around the world switched their networks by default to IPv6 for a 24-hour
period. Intended as a global event to help organizations iron out any glitches
with their deployment, it was a success in the sense that there were no major
crashes or issues reported. Another World IPv6 Week is being planned for June
2012 to encourage organizations to continue investing in IPv6 and to keep the
networks switched on for a longer period of time.
The
longer test period will also provide useful data for analysis, Liu said.
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