On World IPv6 Day IPv6 showed a pulse! However faint that global pulse may have been, our network showed at least some form of IPv6-life occurred on that day.

Long supporters of IPv6, with a significant global DNS footprint handling extremely large volumes of global traffic we, at CommunityDNS, were curious on what may result through an organized focus on the use of IPv6. In my earlier CircleID posting titled, “‘Capacity’—The Hidden Word” I mentioned our network, at that time, supported over 20Gb per second of traffic inbound and 50Gb per second of traffic outbound on an average day. Since then the amount of average traffic supported has grown.

With World IPv6 Day bringing an organized focus to IPv6 we were curious to see what affects such visibility would have on usage.

First of all, IPv6, while supported on our network, represents a very small fraction of traffic handled by our network. There were several things we were looking for as a result of this focused effort.

1. How much of an increase might we see in IPv6-based traffic?
2. Would any increase due to the event become sustained or would IPv6 traffic levels drop back down?

Being that the focus of World IPv6 Day represented a single 24 hour period, the Internet and content span all time zones, thus we were curious as to the impact this event would have not only on the actual day, but also the day before and the day after; as far as increased activity. We also wanted to examine IPv6-based traffic over an eight day period to look for any trends which might indicate sustained traffic as a result of the event.

The following graph illustrates the results of IPv6 traffic across our network for an eight day period.

While there was a brief increase in IPv6 traffic on World IPv6 Day, we still saw only a peak of just over .2 of 1%, representing an increase of .026 of 1%. Sadly the bump in IPv6 usage was not sustained. While it is a start, it is only a faint pulse at best; a pulse which will only be forced to get stronger as people and organizations begin to experience the limitations of not yet adopting IPv6.

As a native-IPv6 and native-IPv4 we look forward to increased adoption and usage of IPv6.