But talk is cheap and the question remains, how far are we actually with rolling out IPv6 deployment?  We tried to answer that question by looking at the Internet Routing tables.

IPv6 deployment ratio.
Each network in the global Internet has a unique Autonomous System (AS) number. An Autonomous System can be an Internet Service Provider (ISP), Enterprise network, content provider or any other sort of network. Each AS number announces one or more prefixes.  By using Geo IP libraries we are able to determine a country for each prefix. This in turn allows us to determine the unique number of networks (AS numbers) per country.   Doing this for both IPv4 as well as IPv6 will result in the IPv4/IPv6 deployment ratio.

Let’s look at for example at Canada. There are 816 Autonomous Systems that originate a prefix registered as in use in Canada.  If we look at the IPv6 routing tables we see that 50 Autonomous Systems announce a Canadian IPv6 prefix.  This results in an IPv6 deployment percentage of 6.1%. Meaning that 6.1% of the networks doing business in Canada are currently actively deploying IPv6.

Results
If we look at the global statistics, i.e. comparing all IPv4 Autonomous Systems with all IPv6 Autonomous Systems we see that the global IPv6/IPv4 deployment ratio is 5.26%. This is slightly higher than the 4.4% we measured in April 2009.

And the winner is
Jersey , a small country between England and France, is the only country scoring a 100% deployment ration.  IPv4 and IPv6 prefixes registered to Jersey are only announced by one provider, AS8681 Jersey Telecom; resulting in a 100% ratio.

Jersey is followed by Cuba (75%), Oman, Monaco, Holy See (Vatican City State) and Fiji all scoring 50%. If we look at the bigger countries, i.e countries with at least a 100 (IPv4) networks we see that Czech Republic (19%), New Zealand(18%), Japan (17%) and The Netherlands (17%) are leading.

Are we on the right track?
Ideally the IPv6 deployment percentage should be around ~100%. Globally today we score a 5% ratio. Although this is one percent higher than half a year ago it’s still very low. Never the less, it’s positive to see that some individual countries such as Tunisia and Uruguay score surprisingly high. And also Europe and parts of Asia seem to be on the right track.

Top 10%
Below an overview of all countries scoring higher than 10%.  A complete list with the results for for all countries can be found here: IPv6 deployment statistics October 2009

a few  weeks ago an interesting IPv6 prefix which caused my parser to start complaining. At first I thought it was a parser bug, but it’s not.  The prefix in question is 339:752f:14::/48  and is  seen by 35 RIS peers thus  seems to propagate fairly far.  Looking back in some old RIB files, it turns out that this prefix has been around for a while already, the first time somewhere in February, then it wasn’t visible for a while showing up in July/August again.  According to this IANA document, 0200::/7 used to be available for those who needed to map OSI NSAP to IPv6 [RFC4548]. However this is now obsoleted and declared historic.

This is probably is good moment to remember to check your IPv6 filters. And ask yourself, do I filter IPv6 announcements? Did you know that Gert Doering publishes some great resources for IPv6 filters? Please see: http://www.space.net/~gert/RIPE/ipv6-filters.html for IPv6 filter list recommendations.