The CTOs of Arbor and Sandvine Analyze "World IPv6 Day"

 

Source: ISOC

Arbor Networks and Sandvine were quick to post an analysis of the "World IPv6 Day" (see "Will IPv6 Usage Increase During "World IPv6 Day"? Arbor and Sandvine are Watching" - here), as measured by their DPI gear.

Don Bowman, Sandvine's CTO, says that "Using test flight data collected from participating MSOs in North America .. we found IPv6 downstream traffic and connections (number of TCP sessions) increased substantially above typical levels, but remained relatively low in comparison to IPv4 (see chart 1) .. the number of 6to4 connections rose from less than 100 at any given time between June 4th and June 7th to more than 1000 connections during IPv6 Day .. In terms of the quality delivered to end subscribers, when measured by the access round-trip time, IPv6 performed as well as IPv4"

See "World IPv6 Day – Sandvine Policy Traffic Switch Records a Smooth Test Flight" - here.


Chart 1 - Source: Sandvine

Dr. Rob Malan, Arbor's CTO, says that "For a bright 24 hour period .. the IPv6 network looked a little bit more like its IPv4 big brother .. the traffic mix for the IPv6 network could be best described as flotsam and jetsam: encrypted file transfers, peer to peer traffic, and experimental protocols. However, during yesterday’s v6 day the mix was dominated with web traffic. The proportion of web traffic grew during the day up until the midnight cutoff point where some of the major content providers withdrew their namespace support. At midnight UTC the web traffic falls off the cliff and the traffic mix returns to its pre-v6-day chatter. The good news [see chart 2] is that IPv6 traffic roughly doubled during the v6-day period. However, doubling a fraction of a percent, is still a fraction of a percent"

See "World IPv6 Day: Final Look and “Wagon’s Ho!”" - here.



Chart 2 - Source: Arbor Networks