The sixth month of the year is both symbolic and historic for IPv6 and a good time to take stock and see how we’ve progressed. But instead of looking at the usual suspects of number of networks, number of users, number of websites, etc… on IPv6, let’s look at some new trends to see what’s happening.

At gogo6 we’ve been measuring the “Buzz” of the IPv6 market every week over the last two and a half years. Each tweet, blog and news story on IPv6 has been counted, categorized and indexed for posterity. By graphing the 102,641 tweets, 6,620 blogs and 4,251 news stories during that time we capture the “Talk” of the market. Reviewing Graph 1 shows spikes in the right places but what is striking is the definitive downward trend in volume as time goes on. The “Talk” is going down.

This could be interpreted as a slowing of interest or a job complete so next I dug into the gogoNET social network database. By plotting the registration dates of the 47,142 networking professionals who joined during this same period of time I could infer the level of interest and work being done in deploying IPv6. The resulting trend line in Graph 2 is flat indicating a constant interest and flow of networking professionals preparing to implement IPv6. These are the “Workers”.

The fruit of this steadfast labor pool can be seen in Graph 3. Plotting the first derivative of the IPv6 Adoption curve generated by the Google Access Graph over the same period of time yields a normalized curve of new IPv6 users. Though the original data is noisy there is a definitive upward trend indicating the rate of new users is increasing over time. And this is what I call the “Walk”—the tangible result of the constant stream of IPv6 workers.

The big headline on this one year anniversary of World IPv6 Launch is the number of IPv6 users have doubled. Taking a closer look indicates a market starting to get the job done. Sure there are more people using IPv6 but more importantly this is happening at an increasing rate—the result of a constant stream of new workers walking the walk by spending less time on naval gazing and more time on doing. Less talk and more walk.