New Excellent Analysis of Where IPv6 Grew in 2023

Where did IPv6 grow in 2023? Where did it not? What countries led on IPv6 deployment?

Recently a colleague of mine at the Internet Society, Robbie Mitchell, laid all this out in a long post titled “Governments and Industry Driving IPv6 in 2023”. With data and many charts he walks through where IPv6 deployment is improving and where more work is needed.

I found it fascinating to see how much the Asia-Pacific region is growing, while here where I live in the USA the growth was minuscule (1.7%). Particularly since historically the ISPs in the USA have been strong drivers of IPv6 growth.

I’ll note that if you want to track IPv6 growth, the Internet Society’s Pulse platform has a page about technologies at: https://pulse.internetsociety.org/technologies – on that page you can see data and maps that show IPv6 deployment (as well as for other technologies).

Graph showing a green line going from near 0 in the bottom left to up over 40 in the upper right. The time period is 2010 to December 2022

Google IPv6 stats consistently peaking over 40%

When I looked at Google’s IPv6 stats recently, it was great to see that the peaks are now consistently all over 40%. Back in January, I wrote about crossing the 35% threshold, so there’s been a 5% growth over the space of the year.

Would we who advocate for IPv6 want it to grow quicker? Of course! And if you look at the per-country page, you can see that it has grown quicker in some countries than others.

But hey… we’ve been at this for a long time, so I’ll celebrate that 5% growth this year! Let’s see if it keeps on going more next year!

P.S. If you want another source of IPv6 statistics, colleagues of mine at the Internet Society are involved with measuring IPv6 on our Pulse measurement platform.

screenshot of the readme page for a GitHub repository about a collaborative IPv6 book

New collaborative book about IPv6 – available for free, and seeking contributors

screenshot of the readme page for a GitHub repository about a collaborative IPv6 book

Why is it that many of the “IPv6 books” are 10+ years old? Where can you find the most current info? Could a group of people using IPv6 today come together and create a new book about IPv6?

Brian Carpenter asked those questions … and then started a project on GitHub to do exactly this – create a “collaborative IPv6 book”. The idea is to capture current knowledge from people working with IPv6 – and then keep it up-to-date.

So far he’s had a number of people contribute text – and the work is underway. As the repository states:

The intention is a practical introduction to IPv6 for technical people, kept up to date by active practitioners.

The book will be available free of charge (and free of advertising) on-line, possibly with an option to obtain a printed copy at cost price.

This GitHub repository is a starting point. It may be replaced by a differently structured repo as the work progresses and we gain experience of how to do it.

You can read the book online, with the caveat that it is still very much in development. If you want to contribute text or edit, there are contributor guidelines that explain the process.

I think it’s great to see another book emerging, and I look forward to seeing how this collaborative model works for all involved.

Interview: IPv6 Buzz Podcast Episode 53 – Applications and IPv6

Image for IPv6 Buzz podcast episode 53

What is the current state of application support for IPv6? What are challenges for applications migrating to IPv6, particularly for enterprise applications? What am I doing at the Internet Society with projects such as Open Standards Everywhere to promote IPv6?

I had the fun of being interviewed by Scott Hogg and Tom Coffeen on their IPv6 Buzz Podcast episode 53 to talk about all of this and more. You can listen here:

Thanks to Scott and Tom, as well as their other host Ed Horley, for having me on the show to geek out about IPv6. Please do give the show a listen – and send along any questions you may have. Thanks!

Getting Close To Making Book Available on GitHub

With the changes to the book and my plans to develop a Second Edition, I also want to change the toolchain I’m using. When I wrote the book for O’Reilly back in 2011, I used DocBook XML as the source. However, these days I’m typically working in Markdown or another lightweight text markup format. So step one for the Second Edition is to migrate the DocBook XML into another format.

My current thinking is to use AsciiDoc, as it has support for footnotes and admonitions (ex. “Warning”), neither of which are supported in most Markdown variants. I’m still working through some plans, but hope to have the book converted over in the next few weeks. (I would welcome feedback on other text formats.)

I’m planning to make the book text available in a GitHub repository so that others can see the text and perhaps offer comments and feedback. If you would like to be notified when I do that, please sign up on my email list.

Sign up to receive updates about the Second Edition

Slides – VT CodeCamp Presentation about Why App Developers Should Care about IPv6

Yesterday (Sept 28, 2019) at Vermont CodeCamp 11 in Burlington, VT, I gave a talk titled “Yes, IPv6 is Real! How To Make Your Apps Work (And Be As Fast As Possible) ” with the abstract:

How well do your applications or websites work over IPv6? As the world runs out of IPv4 addresses, new mobile networks are being deployed as “IPv6-only” with IPv6-to-IPv4 gateways at the edge of those networks. The result is that apps and sites that work natively over IPv6 will be faster for users than apps and sites stuck on only IPv4. Many leading services have already made this transition, and Apple now requires IPv6 for all apps in their AppStore. In this session, you’ll learn about tips and tools to successfully migrate your applications and sites to work over both IPv4 and IPv6.

It was an enjoyable session with a good number of questions from the participants. The slides are available on SlideShare at:

Thank you to the VT Code Camp organizers for accepting my proposal to speak – and for all the participants in the session for the attention and questions. I hope I helped some of them understand a bit more of why they should make sure their apps work over IPv6 – and how to get started!

P.S. If you’d like someone to speak on this topic at a conference or event you are organizing, please do contact me.

Big Change – “Migrating Apps To IPv6” no longer published by O’Reilly – new Second Edition planned for 2020

There has been a big change with the book. About a year ago I approached my editor at O’Reilly about creating a second edition of the book. It turned out that because the book hadn’t really ever sold well (more on that below), they were no longer interested in carrying the book. They were, however, willing to revert the copyright and all content to me (except for the cover art and their branding, of course). This was actually fine by me and so we parted amicably.

I am immensely grateful to O’Reilly for publishing the first edition of this book! As people who have read the book know, the book emerged out of a proposal to speak at the OSCON 2011 conference. I thank the whole team at O’Reilly for all their help in making this book happen.

What’s Next?

I’m now planning a Second Edition of the book, with the plan to simply self-publish through one of the various publishing platforms (most likely Amazon, but we’ll see). The goal will be to publish sometime in 2020.

Sign up to receive updates about the Second Edition

I am also planning to make all of the content freely available in a git repository. It won’t be on Github, because that site only works over IPv4. I’m looking into several Gitlab installations that do work over IPv6.

Along the way I’ll be converting the text from DocBook XML to Markdown, updating a good number of the links, and making a number of other changes.

I am very excited about this change. One of the issues I had with the First Edition (and the major critique in any reviews) was that the book was priced at $24.99. This was not MY choice. In a traditional publishing relationship, the publisher sets the price. The author has no control over this. I always felt this was too high for the small size of the book. Now, I can set a more appropriate price. I can also make the content available for free, as I mentioned above.

If you are interested in receiving updates about the Second Edition as I move forward with it, please fill out this short form.

Thanks to everyone who has helped with the book over the years. Thank you again to everyone at O’Reilly who helped make this book happen.

Now… on to the Second Edition!

Updating the site – and deleting old posts

With some impending changes related to the book, I am cleaning up the site to remove some of the older information. For example, I am removing blog posts related to old sales from many years ago. The one down side to this is that links in old social media posts may not all work. However, an archive of the site is available:

New “State of IPv6 Deployment 2017” Shows 3000% Growth over 5 Years

State of IPv6 coverIn the 5 years since World IPv6 Launch, IPv6 deployment has grown over 3,000 percent! Now there are over 37 countries with more than 5% deployment of IPv6. In the USA, where I live, IPv6 deployment is up over 30% … sometimes close to 35%.

These are all statistics out of the new “State of IPv6 Deployment 2017” report published by colleagues of mine at the Internet Society on this fifth “Launchiversary” of World IPv6 Launch back in 2012.

A key point in the document is that enterprise networks are often the ones lagging farthest behind in deployment of IPv6. Mobile networks are far ahead in many locations, and residential broadband networks are also often very far behind.

One reasons some enterprises struggle is that they have custom applications that need to be migrated to work on IPv6. That was really the reason why I originally wrote this very short book back in 2011 – to help developers understand what they need to be thinking about to move their apps over to work on IPv6.

There are many more resources available in the time since I first wrote the book, including ARIN’s guide on “Preparing Applications for IPv6“. The key point coming out of this “State of IPv6 Deployment 2017” report today is that the time is now to make the move to IPv6!  Start the migration… NOW!

If you are trying to get your management or others in your organization to move ahead with IPv6, download this State of IPv6 Deployment 2017 report and send it around – or send the link around. Hopefully the information inside can help you make the case that the time to move to IPv6 is NOW.

An audio podcast on this topic is also available: