Last year, I begun a small survey to understand what approaches ISPs in Europe are taking to deploy IPv6, eventually expanding it to a global survey.
In preparation for my APNIC 44 presentation of the ongoing results I’ve collected since May 2016, I sent a reminder to network operators working in the region, via APNIC-Talk, and received over 150 new responses.
As of September 2017, 464 people from the APNIC region have responded to the survey, more than any other region.
Looking closely at this figure though, there are still some gaps in economies where responses are coming from — the number of responses from India (n=10) and South Korea (n=11) are quite low, and several smaller economies, which we know have some IPv6 deployment, have not yet responded .
The survey is ongoing, so if you haven’t already taken it, please do, so we can form an even more detailed picture of IPv6 deployment.
Take my survey on how you are deploying IPv6
So, how is IPv6 being deployed in the Asia Pacific?
In terms of access technologies, FTTH, xDSL and 3G broadband are the most popular, while DOCSIS is becoming less so.
Over time, there has also been a gradual increase in the number of IPv6 commercial deployments compared to it being still in trial stages.
With regard to the size of prefixes being used for the WAN link, a /64 continues to be the most popular. Most organizations are using GUA (over 62%), and more ISPs are using the first /64 of the customer’s prefix for this point-to-point.
The numbers for prefix sizes for the customer site remains constant with 22% using a /48, 36% a /56 and 33% a /64. This is something we really need to change — we need to make sure that new and existing deployments should consider using a /48 instead, as I’ve explained previously.
Another interesting point is that 63% of the IPv6 services offer “stable” prefixes (what we call persistent in the BCOP ripe-690 document IPv6 prefix assignment for end-users – persistent vs non-persistent, and what size to choose).
Finally, and this is what I found very interesting, it looks like new IPv6 deployments are using ‘newer’ transition mechanisms such as 464XLAT and MAP-E/T, or even pure dual-stack with public IPv4 addresses instead of CGN.
This is something that we need to continue to stress — IPv4 is gone; deploying dual-stack with public IPv4 addresses is not going to be feasible anymore nor is a greater dependency on CGN, so the right way to go, especially if you also have cellular networks and want to use a single transition mechanism for all of them, is to look into 464XLAT!
If you want to see more results, my slides are available below, as is a video of my presentation at APNIC 44.
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Very effective survey and article for IPv6 deployment