Results of an IPv6 census have revealed the proportion of zones — part of the domain name hierarchy that can be delegated to others — under .com, .net and .org supporting IPv6 increased by 1900 per cent in the last 12 months.
The census, conducted by Measurement Factory and sponsored by Infoblox Inc., found that 25.4 per cent of zones in this year’s sample were IPv6 enabled, jumping from 1.27% of zones in the 2010 sample.
This “dramatic increase”, according to Measurement Factory, is largely attributed to the introduction of IPv6 support US registrar Go Daddy.
However, discounting Go Daddy’s contribution, the percentage of zones supporting IPv6 more than doubled in the past 12 months to surpass 3 per cent.
The registrar helped push the United States into the top three countries in IPv6 adoption, alongside France with registrars Gandi and OVH and the Czech Republic with Active 24.
The census also found that little over 2 per cent of the zones had IPv6-enabled mail servers and less than 1 per cent of them had Web servers supporting IPv6.
As the supply of IPv4 addresses runs out, according to a release, deploying IPv6 will become a “business imperative” for organisations with an internet presence.
IPv4 can only handle 4.3 billion IP addresses, whereas IPv6 can handle a massive 2¹²⁸ addresses.
Infoblox IPv6 Center of Excellence general manager, Cricket Liu, said the results indicated that organisations will need to support the growing number of IPv6-enabled devices accessing their internet.
“If your external presence only supports IPv4, then the only devices that can communicate with you will be those with IPv4 addresses,” he said in a statement.
“To the growing population of pure IPv6 devices, you’re invisible. We can’t ignore the emerging competitive advantages of IPv6, but we also don’t need to adopt IPv6 in one great, costly leap.”
However, it is not just up to organisations to deploy IPv6 but also registrars. If a registrar is not IPv6 enabled, latency issues, poor performance or no connectivity could occur.
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