Tomorrow (6 June 2017) is the fifth anniversary of ‘World IPv6 Launch’, and during this week APNIC is marking the occasion with a series of IPv6-themed posts on the APNIC Blog, including research, success stories, opinions, and more.
IPv6 has been around a lot longer than 2012, of course. But this milestone is a good opportunity to look at the progress made in the past five years on IPv6 — and the story has been positive.
According to APNIC Labs statistics, IPv6 usage in Asia has jumped from 0.5% to 9.5% in the past five years, and in the Pacific, IPv6 usage has grown from 0.2% to 13.6% in the same period.
APNIC has made almost 6,000 IPv6 delegations and more than half of APNIC Members have IPv6 address space (53% at the time of writing).
There have been many notable IPv6 deployments in the APNIC region: FPT Telecom in Viet Nam, Telstra Mobile in Australia, AIS Fibre in Thailand, Indosat in Indonesia, KDDI in Japan, SK Telecom in Korea, and Telekom Malaysia, to name just a few.
The biggest deployment the region has seen, however, is India’s Reliance Jio, the first LTE, all-IP mobile network in India that was the fastest network ever to exceed 50 million subscribers. Almost 90% of its LTE 4G subscribers are using IPv6 — accounting for around 70% of India’ s IPv6 traffic. This has resulted in India’s IPv6 capability increasing from 1% to 16% in 2016 (and now approaching 30%).
The move to IPv6 is a global effort, however, and there have been many more notable deployments around the world from ISPs, content providers, IXPs, CDN providers, and more. To celebrate the milestone, I joined colleagues from the other RIRs around the world to record a short message about IPv6 below.
There’s real momentum behind IPv6, and I hope that within another year or two, we’ll be able to say that IPv6 is the ‘new normal’.
If your organization has not yet begun its IPv6 journey, I’d encourage you to start now. There are plenty of helpful resources available, and, hopefully, you find the IPv6 stories on the blog this week informative (and entertaining).
The views expressed by the authors of this blog are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of APNIC. Please note a Code of Conduct applies to this blog.