June 8^th IPv6 World day came and went without any major glitches, let alone disruption of the internet, and witnessed varying traffic fluctuations depending where on the net observations were made. From a Tata Communications AS6453 perspective, a global tier 1 IP wholesale network, data gathered by a number of probes gave an interesting pulse on what happened in some major international arteries of the internet.

Taking June first IPv6 traffic as a base at value 1 we find 1.04 on June seventh, 1.63 on June 8^th, 1.35 on the 9^th and 1.34 on the 10^th.  In other words IPv6 World Day traffic was 60% higher than the previous day. Note that we are talking about traffic levels in the hundreds of megabit per second range.

While some expected an even higher peak, this respectable showing demonstrated the resilience of the global internet fabric and its capacity for future growth on a global level.  The following three days, IPv6 traffic remained more than 30% higher than pre-June 8^th levels;  the most logical explanation is that major content providers such as Google have continued to provide IPv6 access after expiration of the 24 hours of IPv6 day while the drop observed  after June  8^th seems essentially attributable to some major Content Delivery Networks opting out after the 24 hours as many still have some work to do on load balancers to adequately handle the anticipated growth curves of IPv6 traffic. We can expect to see all major CDN’s move relatively fast however as the competitive pressure cannot but grow. Some  smaller Content Hosters  already provide  ‘A and quad A records’  as standard offering to their customers, in other words both IPv4 and IPv6 to the content they host, providing a growing competitive edge.

On the Indian domestic scene, Tata Communications’ IP network, AS4755, with nodes in more than 120 major centres, deployed a dedicated helpdesk for IPv6 day as well as probes to compare IPv4 and IPv6 quality of service. Traffic was monitored as well as the major content providers accessed in IPv6. The good news is that there was no news.  Here again, the network and its operation proved to be resilient and ready for when the  IPv6 traffic growth will enter the elbow of its exponential growth curve. With the incredible size of this emerging market were twenty million cellphones are added every month, India promises to provide quite a ride.

The prelude to June 8^th IPv6 day also saw a number of service providers upgrade their upstream connectivity to dual stack and  additional peering capacity moved to dual stack bringing IPv6 a step closer to congruence with IPv4.  Jim Huston’s active IPv6 BGP entry table shows the exponential growth phase gathering further momentum with 6389 entries as of June 13^th. On the traffic forecasting front we saw Cisco update their visual networking index and predict staggering mobile data traffic growth with smartphones and tablets becoming prevalent by 2015. This year 2011, humanity will also see reach another milestone in its evolution toward homo connectus: more connected devices than humans on this planet.  As the human market gets saturated and with ARPU (Average Revenue per User) expected to plateau, mobile operators are looking at connected devices as the next growth opportunity.   Recent IPv6 events such as the Ottawa IPv6 Summit filled the University of Ottawa’s amphitheater to capacity including a number of banking and credit card people. The reason for them being there was simply the upcoming era of electronic wallets, each presumably expected to have a unique IP address and some IP security.  Adepts of unprotected NATting and IP address promiscuity should be prepared to share both IPv4 addresses and e-wallets. Wouldn’t it be preferable to enrobe our hard earned e-money in some IPsec and send it out with a unique address and a PIN attached?

This post originally appeared on CircleID

As June 8^th IPv6 World day came and went without any major glitch, let alone disruption of the internet, it is interesting to look at what happened on that day and the immediate aftermath.  Data gathered by probes on five major sites of our global Tata Communications tier 1  AS6453 global network are quite telling.

Taking June first IPv6 traffic as a base at value 1 we find 1.04 on June 7^th,  1.63 on June 8^th, 1.35 on the 9^th and 1.34 on the 10^th.   Note that we are talking about traffic levels in the hundreds of megabit per second range.

This puts June 8^th traffic 60% higher than the previous day, not a bad showing.

This clearly illustrates the success of IPv6 World Day on a global level. The fact that the following days IPv6 traffic remained more than 30% higher than pre June 8^thlevels  can be attributed to the fact that major content providers such as Google have continued to provide IPv6 access after expiration of the 24 hours of IPv6 day.  The drop observed after the June 8^th seems essentially attributable to some of the Content Delivery Networks dropping out as many still have some work to do on load balancers to adequately handle future traffic requirements.  We can expect to see them permanently providing IPv6 access by year-end as the competitive pressure cannot but grow as some smaller Content Hosters already provide both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses as part of their standard service offering

On the Indian domestic network IP network AS4755 a dedicated helpdesk had been set up as well as probes to asses comparative IPv4 and IPv6 quality of service and associated SLA’s. Traffic was monitored as well as the major content providers accessed in IPv6.  The good news is that there is no news. The network and its operation proved to be resilient and ready for when the IPv6 traffic growth will enter the elbow of its exponential growth curve.

At this juncture, the best advise to the enterprise, small business user and consumer is to make sure to that the products they procure supports IPv6 in addition to IPv4. Non availability or vague promise of future support should be seriously considered an exclusion factor. This rule should be applied when selecting an internet service provider, a home or business router, operating software or an application software, be it for the laptop, smartphone or a Cloud based service

By the end of 2011 there will be more connected devices than human beings on the planet. By 2015 they are expected to outnumber humans two to one. As the world is running out of the older shorter IPv4 address format which can accommodate around 4 billion distinct addresses, the need for the longer addresses provided in the IPv6 format is obvious, even more so with India being amongst the world’s top growth markets for advanced telecommunications services.

APNIC happened to be the first Regional Internet Registry to meet in the IANA post IPv4 era. While discussions and proposals on how to divvy up the last ‘slash 8’ into tinier blocks are to be expected, it  was rather unreal to see the energy spent divining how the RIR’s would share IPv4 space that  would eventually be returned to IANA and then regurgitated. A timewarp with the exhaustion clock turning backwards?

Captions like ‘Goodbye IPv4, Hello IPv6’ or with a touch of nostalgia like ‘Goodbye IPv4, we’ll miss you’ are more refreshing. Maybe a sign of thaw, IPv6 starts to percolate faster towards content, enterprise and end-users. Verisign reports 205.3 million Domain Names at the end of 2010 and their readiness for IPv6 and DNSsec. Major content providers and ISP’s are gearing up and the June 8^th IPv6 day gathers momentum. The Paris World IPv6 Summit in February was a success and Informa also plans a World IPv6 Conference in London, UK, in June.

Lightreading reports that operators are looking to CPE suppliers for IPv6 help. They anticipate up to a 100 million IPv6 ready CPE boxes worldwide by the end of 2011 and all major CPE suppliers on board.  The past twelve months have been interesting in this respect with D-Link taking a clear head start while mighty Linksys remained stuck in the starting gate. Their recent attempt at damage control with a rather hollow ‘prepared statement’, when challenged on the IPv6 support issue, shows some nervousness. Some ears must be ringing and IPv6 support can be expected sometime in spring.

Another sign of a new season: IPv6 transition stimulates the demand for networking jobs, time to hone some IPv6 skills.

In April, ARIN will be the second RIR to have its first post IPv4 exhaustion meeting. Some furious chewing on the IPv4 cud is to be anticipated as the first RIR’s will soon run out of undigested slices of IPv4. In the meantime IPv6 will continue to percolate into the capillaries of the internet. Considering that 25% of the French GDP growth in 2010 was internet related and that an additional 450,000 jobs depend on the internet in the next five years, there is no doubt it will be oiled everywhere by a sufficient number of unique IP addresses.

This post originally appeared on CircleID

According to IDC, smartphones outsold personal computers, laptops included in Q4 2010! Nokia just announced the demise of the Venerable Symbian in favour of Windows 7 phone and Microsoft’s bing search engine! Tectonic shifts are under way to adapt to the rise of wireless broadband, an all IP world, and the growing weight of Apple and Google Android. It is also time to head once again for Barcelona with the Mobile World Congress starting on the 14th. Highlights this year? Most probably smartphones and LTE, the only reasonable way to accommodate the upcoming deluge of traffic and associated bandwidth. 180 carriers in 70 countries are now at various stages of testing and deployment while the first 17 LTE networks became operational over the last year and 64 are anticipated to be up and running by end of 2011. Sixty three LTE devices are already approved including the first LTE phones. Verizon and MetroPCS both announced their first LTE smartphones as ready to enter the market.

It might seem obvious that one should be able to talk, send SMS’es and roam with these LTE smartphones; telephony signalling and IP are not obvious bedfellows however. Telephony always loved its signalling with its call set-ups and call-terminations, call data records generation, metered billing and roaming charges. After all considerable revenues are associated with telephony, SMS and roaming. LTE runs over IP however where there is no longer separation of signalling and the call itself. This is where VoLTE and its associated IMS (Internet Multimedia Subsystem) come in. Without a telephone number based signalling system anymore, there will ultimately be only IP addresses to “set up the call”. The need for a one-to-one correlation between IP addresses and ‘subscriber’ and their various services is rather obvious in this context. Five billion smarter phones with multiple services, plus billions of devices begging for unique identification to communicate seamlessly and accurately m2m, imply untold numbers of unique IP addresses.

Yesterday, I was informed that a major 3G Mobile Operator just got their request for a block of IPv4 addresses refused by their RIR for reasons of imminent shortage and is now scrambling to get some advise and council on that famous IPv6 transition. .….Sign of things to come? A recent IETF draft happens to cover possible paths for MNO’s considering IPv6 transition. Some brushing up on LTE and VoLTE should come handy when urged to put a roadmap together. Within a short couple of years, hidden under the hood, IPv6 will provide enormous amounts of VoLTEage. After all, it was designed with mobile in mind.

This post originally appeared on CircleID.

Late last year a colleague quipped : you spent one third of your time on IPv6 this year, yet it still only generates 1% or so of the traffic. What are the chances of him uttering the same sentence coming December with IPv6 traffic still hovering barely over the one percent mark?

Discussions in the Belgian IPv6 Council mailing list in which I participate, and Eric Vyncke’s tally of websites offering IPv6 access on his site led to the observation that Belgian content hosters should be targetted to see more IPv6 accessible content. Some of them lamented about the complexity and cost and the lack of demand, well honed arguments of procrastinators all over the world.

Then came a rather stunning e-mail from French hoster Gandi to their customers announcing that on january 6th IPv6 would be activated in autoconfiguration and that the customers’ server would inherit automatically and at no cost an IPv6 address! Customers could opt out if they did not want IPv6. Details on the IPv6 implementation can be found on their website. Congratulations, Gandi and thank you for dispelling the myth that making content IPv6 accessible has to be a formidable and titanic undertaking.

Adding fuel to the IPv6 accessible content cause, ISOC just announced that June 8th would be World IPv6 Day with some of the major content providers and hosters on board including Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Akamai and Limelight. This IPv6 day follows in the footsteps of the experiment conducted by Heise in Germany last year. They are one of the biggest news sites in the country and made their site heise.de accessible in both v4 and v6 for 24 hours on September 15th 2010 to see if ‘brokeness’ would indeed create problems amongst their user base. The result was so positive that they decided to turn IPv6 access on permanently late September.

All of this bodes well for 2011. Some noticeable rise in IPv6 traffic will go a long way to silence these quipping colleagues every IPv6 proponent and advocate has faced over the years.

This post originally appeared on CircleID.

In May I wrote:

May 7th we learned that two /8’s had been allocated to RIPE, the European Regional registry. Rumour has it that APNIC is also getting a couple very soon, as well as ARIN. If this materializes only nine ‘slash eights’ will be left to distribute. Depletion clocks are being adjusted; on May 12th Potaroo predicted September 9, 2011 to be the fatidic day for IANA depletion and that on April 8, 2012 the ultimate surviving little block living in liberty will be allocated.

Today I can write:

November 30th we learned that two /8’s had been allocated to RIPE and two to ARIN, two are left in the free pool. Rumour has it that they are spoken for by APNIC and that they are waiting for January to claim them. If this materializes nothing will be left in IANA’s free pool to distribute. Depletion clocks are being adjusted again ; today December 11th, Potaroo predicts February 23, 2011 to be the fatidic day for IANA depletion and that on November 23, 2011 the ultimate surviving little block living in liberty will be allocated.

As rumours tend to be more accurate than predictions, the last /8’s are hanging already on this years Christmas tree and one should hurry to get hold of a small little RIR block to put on next year’s tree.

I will miss the decade of heated and passionate debates between Tony Hain and Geoff Huston on when the exhaustion would actually happen. Estimates ranged all the way from 2008 to 2020, with Tony predicting early demise of IPv4 addresses while Geoff initially thought exhaustion would come later. As time passed the interval converged and here we are.

Many ISP’s and corporations watched the clock tick and tick and felt they had all the time in the world. They might have been right for some time but at midnight they might find themselves turned into IPumpkins.

Some still persist in the thinking that, using some clever artifacts, the inevitable can be delayed maybe even indefinitely. Although improbable, it is not impossible. The beauty of the future is its many possible outcomes.

Did I have a plan B if IPv6 would not happen? Yes indeed, it is called dual stack. Our AS6453 global Tier-1 IP network is totally dual stack as for the last five years every traffic and business growth driven upgrade and expansion has mandated IPv4 and IPv6 support. This made the actual exhaustion date an invariable even under the extreme scenario that IPv6 would never have happened. Indeed, our IP transit revenue is just that, IP revenue, v4 plus v6 flavours independently of their proportion.

With the end of the exhaustion clock business, a traffic mix clock would be an interesting and entertaining little tool. When will IPv6 represent 10, 20, 50, 88, 99% of total IP traffic? Make your predictions and let us start some rumours.

I just read that Free in France is about to announce a new ‘freebox’ some name ‘la v6’. Considering that they have the world’s biggest number of IPv6 enabled end users, IPv6 traffic will grow faster than we would have projected yesterday. Interesting to note that the write-up also refers to VoIP rumours; VoIPv6 ?

Happy New Year!

This post originally appeared on CircleID.

With the market for connected humans reaching saturation in advanced economies, mobile operators now see connected devices as the next growth opportunity. ‘Everything that can benefit from being connected will be connected’, according to Ericsson’s CTO. In the meantime, Intel dreams of embedding processors into everything that can gain something from communicating. Intel is quoted as counting on embedded Atom chips to break its dependence on the slowing PC market. And pharmaceutical company Novartis is spending 24 million dollar on an ingestible chip activated by stomach acid and communicating with a patch on the skin which sends the information to a smartphone.

The IPSO, IP for Small Objects Alliance, receives more attention in recent months. A series of free webinars starting with 6lowpan end of this month are most timely as the internet of things and associated revenues opportunities titillate the interest of many a company looking for new growth paths and revenue streams.

While it is a given that the address format will be IPv6, management will ask, and rightly so, for traffic and revenue projections this deluge would generate.

Projections, these days, tend to focus more on when mobile internet will overtake the fixed internet. Factoring the number of human users; this should happen within five years and maybe sooner depending on the speed of deployment of 3G and LTE and price evolution, especially in emerging markets. Some traffic projections for the internet of things are also staggering, if billions of ‘things’ communicate information about themselves to other ‘things’ or computer systems. The latest Economist special report covers the topic of smart systems and talks about a sea of sensors and ‘augmented business’. ABI Research, quoted by the Economist, estimates that the number of radio chips for wireless sensors sold was 10 million in 2009 and could reach 645 million by 2015.

The most recent Cisco Visual Networking Index notes that this year video streaming will overtake peer 2 peer as the number one internet traffic generator and that by 2014 all forms of video will exceed 90% of consumer traffic. Despite a much faster growth rate, mobile IP would still be less than 10% of total traffic volumes.

Could it be that by 2015 we will associate some major internet traffic growth with communicating things?

This post originally appeared on CircleID.

Brokenness refers to the situation whereby a website is made accessible in dual stack, meaning both IPv4 and IP6, using records referred to as A’s for IPv4 and quad A’s for IPv6. Some end-users can experience slower access to the website or in some rarer instances no access at all. Brokenness is mostly attributable to older versions of the Mac Os operating system. The brokenness issue has been very well described by Eric Vyncke in a posting on the Belgian IPv6 website and has been monitored by Tore Anderson from Norway who has been measuring the impact of dual stack on customer loss for more than a year and shows customer loss dropping considerably over the last twelve months.

When Google started to make some of their sites accessible in IPv6, a major concern was broken connections caused by ISP, CPE, firewall and OS issues. It was initially estimated to potentially affect around 0.5% of end-users which is obviously unacceptable for any major search and web browsing site.

The issue has been gaining in importance as the remaining IANA IPv4 address reservoir could be empty as early as February 2011 according to some experts speaking at last week’s ARIN meeting. Google’s Lorenzo Colliti provided some edifying updates on Google’s IPv6 deployment and the brokenness issue. Breakage for all clients was estimated at 0.082% and for white listed ISP’s 0.014% Excluding Mac OS X numbers are in the ‘four nine’s territory’.

The need to increase rapidly the amount of IPv6 accessible content is clearly a rapidly growing priority. Google, Limelight, Akamai where quite adamant restating their commitment to have content and hosted content IPv6 accessible. In the meantime, Eric Vynckes’ compilation of IPv6 accessible website sites worldwide, based on extraction of the top 50 websites per TLD from the Alexa list, will help us us keep track of progress.

By the time ARIN meets next in April 2011, we might be able to offer a toast to the last free slash eight IANA could just have allocated and the Regional Internet Registry who got that last specimen.

This post originally appeared on CircleID.

IPv6 a major catalyst for billions of dollars worth of deals? The Intel announcement of their McAfee purchase for 7.7 billion seems to indicate as much when Dave DeWalt, McAfee CEO is quoted as saying during a conference call, “If we look at the transition from IPv4 to IPv6, we’re seeing an explosion of billions of devices and they all need to be secured.” Then he continues by saying, “The embedded market is a very specific and high-opportunity market for us.” His estimate is that the number of connected devices will grow from one billion to 50 billion within 10 years.

In the meantime Baltimore Gas and Electricity (BGE) signed a contract for the provision of IPv6 based smart readers to equip their 1.2 million customers using a “secure, end-to-end IPv6 platform for BGE to deliver on operational benefits today while also ensuring tomorrow’s energy challenges can be met with a scalable and open platform.”

The same day, September 1st, we see Cisco and Itron sign a strategic agreement to “develop a standards-based, highly secure technology for full IPv6 implementation of field area communications to support smart metering, intelligent distribution automation and interfaces to the customer premise.”

One day later, September 2nd, Cisco announces the purchase of Archrock, a pioneer of IPv6 implementation for sensor network and smart grids, cofounder of IPSO, the alliance promoting IP for small objects, and strong proponent of the IETF 6LoWPAN recommendation which defines the use of IPv6 for low powered objects.

There is definitely an IPv6 smell in the air these late summer days.

This post originally appeared on CircleID.

Aside from increased competition and pricing pressures, mobile operators are facing a multitude of challenges this year.

Migrating to 4G
From an operational standpoint, MNOs are grappling with their migration to 4G, the successor to 3G. In addition to the timing of this migration, to support the kinds of services that consumers expect, carriers are faced with the challenge of providing the necessary high-speed bandwidth to deliver a substantial increase in data rate. From a carrier perspective, the affordability of managing, billing and distributing content over these networks to drive revenue to recover those higher operating costs is another challenge in realizing a 4G vision.

Ensuring Seamless Roaming
Seamless roaming enables a mobile operator’s data subscriber to remain continuously connected as they cross network boundaries and use different radio access networks. Ensuring seamless, international roaming is becoming more and more important as carriers’ heavily valued customers are business subscribers who frequently travel and need their mobile devices to work outside of their home network.

Accounting for SIM Bypass
This year, carriers are also struggling with SIM bypass, when SIM boxes are used to bypass the interconnection between networks and divert international calls to national GSM calls to evade the revenue that operators are entitled to.