In our last post on CircleID, Measuring World IPv6 Day—First Impressions, we showed exactly when World IPv6 Day participants switched on IPv6 on their networks (by way of announcing DNS AAAA records). Now, a few weeks after World IPv6 Day, it’s interesting to see what the longer-term effects have been.

World IPv6 Day was a test flight of dual-stacking content. While it was successful in accomplishing that goal, it also served as a flag date for people to deploy IPv6 on their networks and to keep it running after the day. It was specifically not a goal to enable IPv6 on access networks for the day itself and then turn it off again. The majority of networks did not switch off IPv6 after 8 June as can be seen from the increase in the number of Autonomous Systems (ASes) announcing IPv6 prefixes after World IPv6 Day. While most content providers retracted their AAAA records, at the AS level we observe continued growth before and after the day.

The top part of the graph below shows the percentage of ASes that currently announce one or more IPv6 prefixes. You can see that there was quite an increase over the last few weeks, especially leading up to World IPv6 Day on 8 June, which is indicated by a purple vertical line.

On the bottom part of the graph you can see the daily increase in the number of ASes that announce IPv6 prefixes. On World IPv6 Day itself, 40 more networks announced one or more IPv6 prefix than the day before (out of 38,349 Autonomous System Numbers in the global routing table). This is higher than usual, even though during the weeks before World IPv6 Day we observed a few days with similar peaks. This was probably caused by network operators using World IPv6 Day as a flag day to deploy IPv6. In that sense, World IPv6 Day was a success because it encouraged people to deploy IPv6 earlier than they might have done otherwise.

If you look closely, the table also shows that operators have not been deploying IPv6 on the weekends, except for the weekend before 8 June.

It is good to see that there is still growth after World IPv6 Day, just not as steep as before.

For more information and other measurements, please refer to the background article on RIPE Labs: World IPv6 Day—Long-Term Effects.