It seems that awareness and adoption of the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 addresses is being taken more seriously, not only by network operators, but ISPs as well. According to World IPv6 Launch, Verizon currently leads the nation’s high-speed IPv6 rollout with over 50 percent of their network IPv6 ready. As of August 2014, U.S residential ISP Comcast has reached nearly 30 percent IPv6 deployment nationwide. AT&T has a little over 20 percent of IPv6 deployment, with Time-Warner Cable coming in at a little under 10 percent.
As the pool of available IPv4 addresses has exhausted around the world, transitioning to IPv6 is even more important. While American ISPs are improving their deployment, it’s still a rocky path to integrating IPv4 and IPv6 on a global level.
This is in part due to ISPs using band-aid solutions, such as limiting available memory for IPv6 due to recent internet outages. Popular websites such as eBay and services like password manager LastPass were hit by outages around the middle of August. This was due to older routers and switches that make up parts of the internet failing, due to a 512k BGP route limit that was surpassed for a small amount of time.
In the future, as the internet grows beyond 512k routes, numerous ISPs are changing default configurations to take away memory from IPv6 routes to facilitate IPv4’s growth for the time being. While this is no issue for now, as the IPv6 routing table is less than 20,000 routes, over time it will be necessary to upgrade equipment to carry a full IPv6 and IPv4 routing table.
Jim Cowie, a scientist for DNS solutions provider Dyn said that this is an example that “IPv4 has never really been healthier”, while John Curran, president and CEO of ARIN was quoted as saying, “[It] doesn’t change the need for ISPs and websites to move to IPv6.”
Though the transition to IPv6 has been primarily of interest to network operators and others who administer and work with networks on a daily basis, most users are unaware of the importance and upcoming necessity for IPv6 address adoption.
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