This document describes a measurement 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 IPv6 across the Internet.
The Internet is in a period of transition, where we are migrating the base protocol from IP version 4 to IP version 6. The reason for change is due to the proliferation of connected devices in the Internet, and as a consequence we have run out of unique address values wiuthin the 32-bit space allowed by the IP verrsion 4 protocol.
The technical community has developed a new version of the IP protocol, namely IPv6, that is intended to address this. It was originally anticipated that we would transition the Internet to use IPv6, and complete this activity before we needed to reach for that last available IPv4 address. However, this has not happened, and it now appears that we will have to cope with the twin issues of address exhaustion in IPv4 and IPv6 deployment simultaneously for many years.
This is a huge challenge, and will 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. One of the major inputs to this coordination process is good, reliable data. 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? We would like to inform these questions, and inform the broader conversation about the transition to IPv6, with data.
This is why we are undertaking this IPv6 measurement activity.
Our objective is to publish aggregate information that shows the uptake of IPv6 on a global basis, and on a country-by-country basis, over time across as much of the Internet as we can encompass with these measurement tests.
The measurement is made by tasking a browser to fetch a web object that is only available across IPv6. We distribute this task to end user browsers using the online advertising system, and through the display of the ad we can set the browser a small set of tests that expose the client's ability to successfully use IPv6.
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 fetch test, the time taken to complete the test and the round trip time for packets to be exchanged between your browser and the measurement server.
We retain information relating to the geolocation of this source address and the originating Autonomous System number for this source address. Other data is held 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 in undertaking this activity.
If you have any questions about this measurement activity please contact us at: research (a) apnic.net