This document outlines activity being undertaken by APNIC, the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre. The aim of the activity is to conduct a broad based long term measurement of the level of uptake of various technologties across the public Internet by viewing the Internet from the perspecive of its user base.
The Internet is a collection of providers of various services that work in concert to provide users with access to a rich collection of digital content, services and tools. There is no entity that is in charge of this envrionment, and the actions of all of these providers are orchestrated through the pressures of market forces and competition rather than by regulatory fiat.
At the same time the Internet continues to grow in scope and intensity of use, and therre is constant pressure to evolve the technology base of the network to improve its efficiency, resilience and scalability. The result is a constant pressure to transition across technologies.
One of the more longstanding such transitions is the adoption of version 6 of the Internet Protocol. Of course that's not the only such transition underway, and other transition incluse the adoption of a secure framework for the DNS name system (DNSSEC), the adoption of the QUIC transport protocol, and the use of Expliciut Congestion Notification(ECN), to name a few.
These transition represent a significant challenge, and require the coordinated actions of many actors within the Internet, including content providers, equipment vendors, application developers, Internet Service Providers, policy makers and many others. In the absence of coordinated regulatory oversight, one of the major inputs to this coordination process is good, reliable data. For example, with respect to the IPv6 transition, how well are we doing with IPv6 deployment? Which sectors are going well? What are our expectations about the time frame of transition? How can we help the Internet to transition to IPv6? Our response to such questions is to publish aggregate information that shows the uptake of IPv6 on a global basis, on a country-by-country basis, and provider-by-provider over time across as much of the Internet as we can encompass with these measurement tests. More generally, these transitions entail each provider making independent decisions to embark of such technology transitions, and what can facilitate such decisions is accurate and current data on what other providers are doing.
At APNIC we would like to inform these questions, and inform the broader conversation about the the Internet's evolutionary path with accur4ate and relevant data. This is why we are undertaking this measurement activity.
Our measurements are made by tasking a browsers to resolve DNS Names and fetch very small web objects, exercising a particular technlogy in so doing. We distribute these measurement tasks to end user devices by using the Google's online advertising system.
Respecting your privacy is important for APNIC. We do not collect any personal data in this activity. The data we collect and retain includes the combination of success and failure for the measurement tests, and the time taken to complete the test.
We retain information relating to the assumed geolocation of this source address and the originating Autonomous System number for this source address. Other collected data is held temporarily until the analysis is complete and then destroyed.
This measurement activity is being undertaken by APNIC Labs as a service to the Internet community at large. We would like to acknowledge the generous support that has been provided by Google Research in undertaking this activity.
If you have any questions about this measurement activity please contact us at: research (a) apnic.net