Posted by
Don Bowman in
Yesterday was World IPv6 Day and Sandvine, along with many other participating companies, flipped the switch and made our website available over IPv6. The day was organized by the Internet Society with the hope that World IPv6 Day would motivate organizations across the industry to prepare their services for the transition from IPv4 to IPv6.
As IPv4 networks continue to make the transition to IPv6, and new networking technologies requiring IPv6 (such as LTE), are rolled out globally, it is important for Internet service providers to ensure their network policy control solution is fully IPv6 capable. Â Consequently, this global trial run of IPv6 serves as an important benchmark, and was closely watched in network operations centers around the world.
For Sandvine, this was the perfect opportunity to demonstrate the IPv6 readiness and reporting capabilities of our Policy Traffic Switch (PTS), as a number of Tier-1 MSOs used the PTS to closely monitor network performance during this global trial of IPv6. Using test flight data collected from participating MSOs in North America, we were able to look at both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic before and during the event, in order to measure the impact of IPv6 Day.
Overall we found IPv6 downstream traffic and connections (number of TCP sessions) increased substantially above typical levels, but remained relatively low in comparison to IPv4 (which exceeds native IPv6 traffic by a factor of about 1000).Figure 1 shows the immediate impact of IPv6 Day when measured by native IPv6 traffic from Google, Facebook, Yahoo and YouTube. Â The rapid rise in native IPv6 traffic occurs at exactly 8:00pm EDT on June 7, the moment at which IPv6 Day officially began. Â Larger spikes followed at various points throughout the day, usually corresponding to the peak evening hours of each timezone.
Figure 1 – Native IPv6 Traffic by Popular Domains on World IPv6 Day
(Source: Network Demographics)
Figure 2 highlights the number of HTTP connections made via IPv6, observed on a participating network.  Notice that the number of 6to4 connections rose from less than 100 at any given time between June 4th and June 7th to more than 1000 connections during IPv6 Day.  When examining IPv6 traffic itself, transition protocols seemed to show more significant gains than native IPv6 – 6to4 protocol usage increased 10 times, 6over4 increased 5 times, while native IPv6 and Teredo usage patterns remained relatively unchanged.
Figure 2 – Total IPv6 HTTP Connections June 4-8
(Source: Network Demographics)
In terms of the quality delivered to end subscribers, when measured by the access round-trip time, IPv6 performed as well as IPv4. Â Overall, this is the metric that is most relevant to users, and underscores the fact that IPv6 Day was a smooth test flight. Â Be sure to check back next week when we post the complete Global Internet Phenomena Spotlight with a wider range of insights revealed by World IPv6 Day.
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