The day after World IPv6 test Day, it looks as if the Internet 1.0 has been getting back to its IPv4-borne normality. Monitoring centres report that the IPv6 has one again retreated to the shadows with traffic “falling off a cliff.”
For the 24-hour test period, which ran from midnight UTC (ET+4) on 8 June, IPv6 traffic appears to have roughly doubled, as perfectly illustrated by the spike recorded by network infrastructure company Akamai, reaching perhaps fractions of a per cent at peak.
Saying that IPv6 traffic at least ‘doubled’ is not the whole story however and contains good and bad news for those who hope that IPv6 migration can happen sooner rather than later. Indeed, traffic doubled but mainly because it was already at incredibly low levels that barely registered. Privately, many engineers are not even convinced that it is possible to accurately measure IPv6 traffic at all so insignificant is its presence.
On a positive note, measuring traffic against the Internet as a whole is misleading because some parts count more than others. Google’s servers are a part of the Internet that count more than most and the company recorded IPv6 traffic as hitting as much as 0.3 percent, a huge jump for a protocol that until a day ago had barely been used to do more than carry out engineering research.
If 8 June proved IPv6 can survive the real world, the problem is what appears to have happened next. Hopes that content delivery networks (CDNs) would keep the protocol switched on have been dashed, with every recording centre registering IPv6 melting away from the first minutes of 9 June as rapidly as it had advanced only the day before.
