The primary in a sequence of blogs all through 2025 highlighting the state of IPv6 throughout the business, finest practices to contemplate, and the way Cisco helps prospects on their journeys with its services and products.
The complicated historical past of IPv6
IPv6: a protocol with an extended and winding historical past, and one that’s certain to evoke a variety of reactions upon point out – from skepticism to curiosity, from dismissal to openness, from indifference to concern, and every thing in between. More often than not, the primary issues I hear are both “It’s by no means going to occur” or “What’s happening with IPv6 anyway?” The primary is kind of straightforward to handle – it is occurring. The progress might not be uniform world wide nor throughout market segments, however the knowledge is there, and it might come as a shock to many.
The rise of IPv6 site visitors
The proportion of world IPv6 site visitors Google sees throughout all its properties from customers didn’t cross the 1% threshold till 2013. Since then, it has risen dramatically, hitting round 48% on the finish of 2024. Going by nation, america is at 53%, whereas France, Germany, and India are at 78%, 76% and 72%, respectively. As of 2022, Akamai noticed 52% of their US site visitors as IPv6 and Fb was seeing over 61% within the US. And but when one digs into the information, you discover that Residential and Cell segments have pushed a number of these numbers, with Enterprise and Public Sector lagging.
Delayed adoption regardless of early promise
Given these outstanding ranges of adoption, it’s pure to marvel why it has taken so lengthy to deploy a protocol that’s 30 years outdated (!). Many individuals have reminiscences of the 1995-2015 time interval the place there was a number of discuss and hype round IPv6, however nothing ever appeared to materialize. Community professionals bought rounds of coaching, it was included into examination materials, and we even had earlier authorities mandates, however nothing ever appeared to get deployed.
Across the identical time because the creation of IPv6, the business additionally developed some life extenders for IPv4 – CIDR, VLSM, NAT and RFC 1918 personal handle area – that turned out to be so efficient they delayed the necessity for IPv6 not simply by a pair years, however by a number of many years. However as profitable as they had been, they nonetheless couldn’t overcome the truth that 32 bits merely isn’t sufficient area for immediately’s international Web. We ran out of recent public IPv4 addresses at hand out within the mid 2010’s and are nonetheless feeling the results: Costs have skyrocketed on the secondary markets. ISP’s have needed to more and more deploy Service Grade NAT and shoulder the operational points that accompany it. Enterprises have needed to always re-address their networks to squeeze each final bit out of every subnet. Moreover, many have needed to cope with the ache of overlapping personal handle area, as totally different components of their community began utilizing the identical handle blocks independently. This forces an increasing number of NAT simply to realize inside communication, not to mention exterior connectivity.
The shift in direction of IPv6
The excellent news is we had an answer able to go – it had simply been in hibernation. Nevertheless, it was going to require a staff effort, an endeavor that has been working effectively in some areas, however that we nonetheless battle with in others. Service Suppliers, each cell and terrestrial, have IPv6-enabled lots of their networks (with some selecting to run a single-stacked IPv6 core), giant content material suppliers have turned on dual-stack to function many potential prospects as doable, and main working techniques distributors have ramped up their help. Mix these with developments like Pleased Eyeballs (an algorithm constructed into most endpoints that can try IPv6 first, however shortly fail over to IPv4 with none noticeable delay to the consumer) and you start to see why adoption has considerably elevated.
Nevertheless, extra work is required inside Enterprises. There are an entire set of middleboxes, software program suites, monitoring and administration instruments, identification and coverage merchandise, and different operational concerns that current challenges not confronted by cell and residential customers.
Governmental help and IPv6 shifting ahead
Many governments world wide, together with america with OMB M-21-07, have seen this and are placing extra emphasis behind closing these gaps [1]. They foresee an IPv6-only future and know that remaining in a dual-stack state indefinitely is the worst state of affairs to be in, regardless that it’s nearly actually required within the short-term. This future isn’t just about overcoming handle exhaustion, but in addition presents new and thrilling alternatives round structure and operations that merely weren’t doable in a constrained IPv4 world. Whereas Cisco has printed a bit on this beforehand [2], my colleagues and I are going to make use of the remainder of 2025 to put out a sequence of blogs that can enable you to on that journey: how to consider and plan your new (practically infinite) handle area, how one can transition from IPv4-only to IPv6-only, concerns for safety and operations, the function of materials and different architectural designs, and what administration and monitoring seems to be like in an IPv6 world. Keep tuned!
Associated blogs
[1] IPv6 and the OMB Mandate: What’s Your Technique?
[2] Accelerating Your Journey to the 128-bit Universe
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