The Business Case for IPv6

First, A Word About IPv4

Before we talk about Internet Protocol version 6, a brief word on Internet Protocol version 4.

The Internet has experienced exhaustion of the global supply of public IPv4 addresses.  Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) allocate addresses to companies in their respective geographic regions and their supply of public IPv4 addresses ran out years ago.  In other words, all the public IPv4 addresses have been allocated, there are no more available.  In this graph, we can see the burn-down from the 5 RIRs around the world and observe the scarcity of public IPv4 addresses.

If an organization requires more public IPv4 addresses, then they must now buy them from another company.  They must go through the address transfer process which can be an expensive transaction.

As a result of IPv4 address scarcity, there is increased fragmentation of IPv4 address prefixes.  Subnets get segmented into smaller and smaller networks with increasing utilization and higher number of hosts on those IPv4 networks.

Increasing density of the Internet Population has been occurring since the 90s.  Increased density often results in re-addressing which can be a costly operational expense and can be risky for complex applications.  Continued growth of the Internet causes ballooning Internet routing tables.  Imagine where the regression line on this active Internet routes graph extrapolates in 10 years.  Organization’s current routers could run out of memory and companies should budget for costly future upgrades.

With this increased IPv4 address scarcity comes an increasing reliance on Network Address Translation (NAT).  Many service providers have implemented large-scale Network Address Translation systems and now provide only private IPv4 addresses to their subscribers.  Therefore, the subscriber’s IPv4 Internet traffic gets backhauled through the NAT and their connections compete with many thousands of other subscribers to get through and reach the Internet.  This adds latency, delay, jitter, and potential connection loss when using IPv4.

As a result, IPv4 addresses are only Locally Significant within their respective networks.  This makes reputation filtering difficult, increases the anonymity of attackers, and reduces security practitioners’ situational awareness due to numerous address overlaps.  NATs force applications to adjust to the wide variety of NAT behaviors and break the ideal end-to-end model of the Internet Protocol.

 

Billions of IP-Connected Devices

New companies and expanding businesses need a plentiful supply of unique Internet addresses that they won’t be able to cheaply obtain.  Companies growing by acquisition won’t have the unique non-overlapping addresses they require, thus perpetuating a cycle of re-addressing acquired company networks.  Furthermore, many enterprise organizations are even struggling with the limitations of their supply of private IPv4 addresses especially when it comes to deploying large-scale systems such as cloud and IoT.

Numerous IoT devices could also benefit from native IPv6 connectivity.  Billions of connected devices require Billions of addresses, and this can’t be achieved with the scarcity of either public or private IPv4 addresses.

The Internet can’t continue to grow with IPv4. IPv4 is stifling innovation.

Organizations can’t indefinitely sustain their current business models using IPv4.

Expansion and innovation can’t continue with only approximately 3.7 Billion usable public IPv4 addresses.

Today, approximately 6 devices sit behind a NAT, mapped to a single public IPv4 address.

 

Abundance of Globally Unique IPv6 Addresses

One of IPv6’s most well-known features is its plentiful supply of globally-unique 128-bit addresses.  340-undecillion addresses, facilitates deploying any imaginable network with this large address space.  IPv6, therefore, has benefits for addressing all the public Internet systems with non-overlapping addresses.

IPv6’s plentiful addresses mean that Network Address Translation is not required when communicating with cloud environments, or when an acquisition occurs.   IPv6 can be used by companies to directly communicate without the need for address translation.  Direct communication is possible and backhauling communications through NATs is not necessary.  IPv6 improves performance and restores the intended end-to-end model of the Internet Protocol.

 

IPv4 to Dual-Protocol to IPv6-Only Transition Stages

IPv6 is Not New.  IPv6 has been standardized since the late-1990s and has been under development for many years.  IPv6 is now a full Internet standard.   The Internet has been using IPv6 for over 20 years.

A decade ago we had mostly IPv4 networks with small pockets of IPv6.  Today, Networks making up the Internet now use both IPv4 and IPv6 simultaneously riding across the same physical network links.

Organizations don’t need to switch directly from IPv4 to IPv6, the recommended transition approach is to simultaneously run IPv4 and IPv6 in parallel, making systems dual-protocol, then eventually disabling IPv4, leaving an IPv6-only network.

Many systems already support IPv6.  IPv6 is implemented in all modern host operating systems and it is enabled by default and works automatically.  Enterprise firewalls, routers, switches, wireless LAN systems, servers, laptops, mobile phones, tablets, and much more already support IPv6.  IPv6 just needs to be enabled on the network with a few simple commands on the network devices.

To deploy IPv6, there isn’t anything to purchase.  Much of what enterprises already have in their environment already supports it.  It is just a matter of turning it on.

Now we are in the middle stage of the Internet transition to IPv6 where many networks run IPv4 and IPv6 side-by-side.

Virtually all core backbone Internet service providers now offer IPv6 connectivity to their subscribers.  They may have even provisioned it by default unbeknownst to their customers.

A large percentage of people already have IPv6-enabled devices connected to their IPv6-enabled mobile service provider network.  Most mobile devices use native IPv6 today and residential IPv6 Internet connectivity is increasing.  If you own a modern mobile device with a major wireless carrier, you are probably already using IPv6 and didn’t even realize it.

Now we are starting to move into the late state of the transition to IPv6 where we start to disable IPv4 in certain environments, leaving only IPv6.  In fact, your mobile device may in fact already be an IPv6-only device.

 

IPv6-Reachable Internet Content

An increasing number of content providers now support IPv6 Internet connectivity to their applications and now many of the world’s top websites use IPv6.  This W3Techs graph shows that 58% of the Top 1000 sites now use IPv6.  An interesting note here, the more popular the website, the more likely it is to use IPv6.

It is important to remember that for every webpage that loads over IPv6, there was one less webpage that loaded over IPv4.  The transition can quickly reach and surpass the tipping point as IPv6 deployment gets underway.

In fact, the Internet has been running IPv6 for nearly 20 years.  IPv6 traffic volumes have been increasing substantially over the last 10 years.

This Google IPv6 Statistics graph shows worldwide IPv6 traffic volumes observed from Google’s global perspective.  Every year the amount of IPv6 traffic Google receives worldwide increases by 5%.

It is easy to see that IPv6’s usage has increased in the past decade.

Google’s networks receive over 55% of their traffic origination from within the United States over IPv6 transport.  That means that 45% of their connections are received over IPv4.

If an organization was waiting until Google’s IPv6 traffic volumes reached 50% to embark on their own IPv6 journey, then the time to start was a couple years ago.

 

IPv6 Capable Rate by Country

This Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) Regional Internet Registry site shows the IPv6 capable rate by country

APNIC’s statistics show that the amount of IPv6-capable devices in the United States is now over 57%.  IPv6 is now used by the majority of Internet users within the US.

Some entire countries are surpassing 50%, and even 70% IPv6 Internet traffic.  In fact, IPv6 traffic volumes are now surpassing IPv4 traffic volumes in many countries around the world.  Numerous countries around the world now have an abundance of IPv6-enabled Internet-connected devices  We can see that many countries are now using more IPv6, and less IPv4.

Therefore, IPv4 is becoming the legacy Internet protocol version and IPv6 is now the dominant Internet Protocol.

 

Can IPv6 Really Be Faster than IPv4?

There is now documented evidence showing that IPv6 can perform better (on average) than IPv4.  Back in 2016, we started to observe that IPv6 communications were faster than IPv4 communications (Part 1, Part 2).  Therefore, application owners will want their customers to be able to reach them over IPv6 because it will be faster.  Organizations will also want their end-users to use IPv6 to reach Internet applications faster.

And in 2021, Akamai observed that IPv6-enabled (and especially IPv6-only T-Mobile devices) were much faster reaching IPv6-enabled CDN services.  The Round-Trip-Time (RTT) improvement comes from the fact that IPv6-enabled end-user devices reach IPv6-enabled web services faster because those connections don’t require address translation.

APNIC collects and documents measurements of Round-Trip-Time for IPv6 and IPv4 and compares them.  This graph subtracts the IPv4 latency from the IPv6 latency, and if IPv6 latency is a lower number of milli-seconds than IPv4’s latency, then this results in a negative number.  We can see that the RTT is negative (meaning IPv6 is faster on average) for all countries and regions, with the exception of a few remote geographies.

A couple years ago these measurements showed that IPv6 was faster.  These measurements were influenced by many mobile devices that are already using IPv6-only communications and they needed to pass through protocol translators to reach IPv4-only websites and applications.

Now we see that the performance gap is reducing as more end-user devices and more applications use dual-protocol connectivity.

Now we are seeing more websites and applications starting to use IPv6 and the performance gap between IPv6 and IPv4 is narrowing.  IPv6-only mobile devices can access the increasing number of dual-protocol websites over IPv6 directly without having to pass through protocol translators.

If an organization wants to continue to remain relevant to the large number of Internet-connected systems already using IPv6, then they need to implement IPv6 now.  Consider the performance improvements that customers using IPv6-only mobile devices will experience once they connect to public-facing applications using IPv6.

Use IPv6 if you want your public Internet-facing applications to be accessible to the broadest Internet population.  Use IPv6 on your Internet-facing applications if you want to take advantage of the performance improvements of IPv6.

 

Making the Business Case for IPv6

IPv6 is not a passing fad. IPv6 is an eventuality and is inevitable.

The global IPv6 transition is already underway.

An IPv6-enabled Internet already exists and IPv6 Internet content exists.

All network devices and hosts are already IPv6 capable.  It is just a matter of turning it on.

Organizations are migrating to IPv6 to communicate with the broadest range of Internet users.

Companies will want to enable IPv6 to be able to communicate with the broadest population of customers, partners, vendors, suppliers, employees, and everyone.

Companies should be planning to transition to IPv6 sooner rather than later to preserve Internet business continuity.

Furthermore, starting to move some networks to IPv6-only can reduce your operational costs of having to maintain two protocols running on the network at the same time.

If an organization is connected to the Internet, then they need to prepare to deploy IPv6 now.

If you don’t know where to start, then we can help you plan for the deployment of IPv6 and teach you how to do that.  We can train your teams on IPv6 and custom tailor IPv6 training classes to suit your exact needs.  We can help you begin and make rapid progress toward IPv6, helping you gain a competitive advantage and preserving your ability to communicate with the Internet.  Leveraging our expertise will help accelerate your organization taking advantage of IPv6’s benefits.

Starting with a business case is a great first step in getting teams aligned on the goal of IPv6 deployment and helps organizations prioritize those parts of their networked environments that could derive the greatest benefit from IPv6.

From there you get organized and start to develop your initial architectures and designs before moving onto low-level configurations prior to implementation.

What are you waiting for?

 

Scott Hogg has over 30 years of network and security experience and is president of Hogg Networking (HoggNet.com). Scott Hogg specializes in teaching Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) and providing implementation guidance to large organizations. Scott is CCIE #5133 (Emeritus) and CISSP #4610.  Scott is Chair Emeritus of the Rocky Mountain IPv6 Task Force (RMv6TF), a member of the Infoblox IPv6 Center of Excellence (COE), and co-author of the Cisco Press book on IPv6 Security.