Chris Grundemann, director of 'Deployment and Operationalisation' at the Internet Society, calls them "broccoli technologies". You don't make any money with it, but they are really good for you. Grundemann places IPv6 with the DNSSEC and BCP38 as broccoli technology.
True, hardly anyone has made a profit with IPv6 and that will not be too different in the future. But in the current short run, not using IPv6 could mean losing money. Are you hosting websites, your clients will most likely want to be able to identify individual visitors. In a while, that will be almost impossible without IPv6. Are there applications running on your network and do you continue to use IPv4, prepare yourself for unclear support questions, since that service will be very unreliable. IPv6 is good for you, your clients and the users.
Are we, in the Netherlands, on the right track with IPv6? According to some statistics, we are doing pretty well. 52% of the Dutch ISP networks have advertised an IPv6 range already. Compare that to Germany, Belgium, the United States or China, with 44%, 39%, 14% and 15% respectively.
China is often named as the frontrunner in the area of IPv6, which is nonsense. The percentage of Chinese visitors with IPv6 Google provides is 1%. Nothing compared to Germany, Belgium and the United States with 14%, 32% and 14% respectively. And the Netherlands? Unfortunately, we are only marginally doing better than the Chinese there, with a mere 2%. Worldwide, 5% of the Google visitors are IPv6-enabled on weekdays. On weekdays? Yes, because in the weekends it is 6%. This shows that, worldwide, the consumer's ISP's are better than the corporate ones. Deutsche Telekom (31%) and Comcast (38%) are on a roll. The provider in the lead is, by far, one of the biggest providers of our southern neighbours: Telenet with 53%.
Here too, the Netherlands are the odd one out. The corporate providers are all providing IPv6 connectivity, while the consumer providers like KPN, Ziggo and UPC are far behind on the IPv6 front.
Not only internet access is a point to improve upon, hosting is one as well. Out of the Dutch Alexa Top 100, only 24 websites are accessible and 18 accept emails over IPv6. Worldwide, that percentage is even lower than 14% for IPv6 accessibility on the Alexa Top 1000.
And how does BIT do this? Nearly all our services have been IPv6 ready for a decade now. Nevertheless, most of our clients do not seem to be using that IPv6 connectivity. The connections to Google that go through BIT only have a 4% IPv6 usage level. And our client's users could use another push towards IPv6 as well: on our shared hosting platforms, there is an average of 4% IPv6 visitors. Outgoing email is doing a little better with 5% and on good days, incoming email has a nice 32%. Not really surprising, but nice nevertheless that the web servers for our own sites see an average number of IPv6 users of 16%.
Come take a bite of IPv6 on March 26th and/or April 23rd and visit our IPv6 seminars. Hopefully it will taste like more broccoli technology. Below, you can see how others have turned their resolutions into action.
The percentages provided in this blog have been recovered from: