Application scaling provider Akamai Technologies has developed a real-time graph of IPv6 traffic across its network for World IPv6 Day today, but unfortunately Australia hardly rates a mention.
Akamai’s chart shows a sharp spike in IPv6 activity around midnight UTC on June 8 – up from less than 50 hits per second to more than 450 – for the whole world, but Australian traffic was languishing at only four hits per second.
The live data visualisation is available at: http://www.akamai.com/ipv6.
It will show the pattern of IPv6 traffic over the 24 hours of World IPv6 Day.
Akamai customers include Qantas, Ozsale.com.au, MCM Entertainment, SonyBMG and Moshtix.
World IPv6 Day has certainly done a lot to raise awareness about the next-generation Internet protocol, however, as the Internet Society of Australia (ISOC-AU) advised this week, many companies are struggling to fit the migration into their network administration.
Other observers have warned the event may draw the attention of hackers who could disrupt it with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
In 2008, local ISP Internode claimed to be the first in the country to offer to give national direct access to IPv6 as part of its standard service. More recently, IPv6 interest soared in February 2011 when the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) was allocated two large blocks of IPv4 addresses. APNIC then announced the full allocation of one of the stocks allocated to it.
Akamai vice-president of engineering, Andy Champagne, said IPv6 adoption is still in its beginning stages, but early planning and testing is critical for all Internet businesses.
Ian Teague, senior manager for Akamai Technologies in Australia, said this index is similar to what the company does for for media, commerce and financial services sectors with customers’ raw data.
"Why is IPv6 so low in Australia? It’s still low everywhere," Teague said. "This is something for World IPv6 Day so not meant to represent the bulk of customers. It's a select group that create international traffic and they are using our service for IPv6 in early an adoption phase."
Akamai will open its IPv6 offerings to customers over the next 12 months and networks with native IPv6 can engage with Akamai to have the protocol configured in their locations.
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