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Networking The Internet Stats IT

Switzerland Tops IPv6 Adoption Charts; US Lags At 4th 155

hypnosec writes "According to recent statistics, Switzerland has topped the IPv6 adoption charts by leapfrogging Romania, which led the charts for nearly a year. According to Google, Switzerland's adoption stands at 10.11 percent — the highest for any country. Romania, on the other hand, has an adoption rate of 9.02 percent, followed by France at 5.08 percent. Switzerland took the top position near the end of May and the primary reason seems to be Swisscom and its drive to adopt the next IP version. The U.S. stands at fourth place with just 2.76 percent adoption."
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Switzerland Tops IPv6 Adoption Charts; US Lags At 4th

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  • Lags? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jo7hs2 ( 884069 ) on Sunday June 02, 2013 @07:46AM (#43888241) Homepage
    I'd say the largest economy in the world is probably not lagging by being fourth, considering the shear amount of equipment in use, and that the three preceding countries are considerably more compact. Big ships make wide turns.
    • Re:Lags? (Score:4, Funny)

      by jo7hs2 ( 884069 ) on Sunday June 02, 2013 @07:48AM (#43888257) Homepage
      Sorry. That isn't a car analogy. Big trucks make wide...darn still not a car... A Lincoln Town Car doesn't maneuver like a Honda Fit. There.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      Shear equipment? Baaah!

    • No kidding (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Sycraft-fu ( 314770 ) on Sunday June 02, 2013 @08:04AM (#43888299)

      This seems to be a way to try and take a case where the US is doing decent and instead make it bad and hate on the US. So the US is 4th, out of 196 nations, some of which have very little infrastructure? Sounds like it is doing s decent job to me. Particularly since the US has a ton of infrastructure, some of it older (given that the Internet started in the US) and that the IPv4 shortage is not as acute there since the US has a lot of blocks allocated to it.

      The US doesn't have to be first in everything, it isn't a case of "anything other than first is a failure."

      IPv6 adoption is going to be a slow process. There's a lot to doing it right. In particular you find plenty of equipment either flat out doesn't support IPv6, or doesn't support it in hardware, meaning that it can't do much of it without falling over.

      • by bondsbw ( 888959 )

        the IPv4 shortage is not as acute there since the US has a lot of blocks allocated to it

        Just reposting this for emphasis. Nobody's wife or mom is complaining about IPv4 block shortage; just like anything else in life, that's really all that matters.

        • Perhaps they're complaining about not being able to access a particular web site because Internet Explorer for Windows XP and Android Browser for Android 2.x can see only the first SSL certificate on port 443 of a given IP address. These browsers don't support Server Name Indication, which is required for name-based virtual hosting with HTTPS. For example, https://pineight.com/ [pineight.com] works on most browsers but gives a certificate error on IE/XP and Android 2 because pineight.com shares an IPv4 address with other
          • by gidoca ( 2726773 )
            It seems to me that a widespread deployment of SNI is a lot easier than a widespread deployment of IPv6. Note that IPv6 isn't enabled by default on Windows XP, so as an XP user you are out of luck either way.
        • Surely there's at least one mother or wife who works in IT...
      • by Anonymous Coward

        The US used to be the first (I'm talking about the Internet in general). Not anymore. It's not not just about IPv6, it's also about speed and access. The same is true for cellphone and probably a lot of other technologies. The US is technologically falling behind. That's the point.

        And actually the US is not fourth out of 196 country, it is fourth out of some arbitrarily chosen countries. I looked up a few countries and, while the US is at 2.78%, Japan is at 3.13% and Germany is at 2.81%. So it's in sixth pl

        • by jrumney ( 197329 )

          Compared with Europe, and especially Asia (notable by its absence in the table of top adopters of IPv6), US has a much larger pool of IPv4 addresses left, so there is less urgency to adopt IPv6. And yet there it is, up in fourth place. The only region with less urgency is Africa.

          • by KGIII ( 973947 ) <uninvolved@outlook.com> on Sunday June 02, 2013 @10:27AM (#43889001) Journal

            Most of Africa could probably be switched by just buying a new home router at Amazon.

          • And actually the US is not fourth out of 196 country, it is fourth out of some arbitrarily chosen countries. I looked up a few countries and, while the US is at 2.78%, Japan is at 3.13% and Germany is at 2.81%. So it's in sixth place at best.

            Compared with Europe, and especially Asia (notable by its absence in the table of top adopters of IPv6), US has a much larger pool of IPv4 addresses left, so there is less urgency to adopt IPv6. And yet there it is, up in fourth place. The only region with less urgency is Africa.

            Were you even paying attention? You tried to give an excuse why USA shouldn't be leading, which didn't refute the argument that they're in a position worse than fourth, and then you claimed they're still in fourth.

        • by jbolden ( 176878 )

          AFAIK the US was never first with cellphones. Given our low population density we have lagged in cell from the beginning. If anything the last 5 years have been a period where the US had done a remarkable "catching up".

      • Re:No kidding (Score:4, Informative)

        by Bengie ( 1121981 ) on Sunday June 02, 2013 @10:53AM (#43889183)
        At this point, it's not the infrastructure that needs to be updated. The backbone of the Internet has been IPv6 for almost a decade now and almost all DSL/Cable hardware is IPv6 native. The only real stuff that needs to get updated is ISPs actually configuring their hardware and end-users having IPv6 capable NAT/Routers.
        • by jbolden ( 176878 )

          Agreed. But the other thing is enterprise software and business. Home and small business are easy.

      • by kasperd ( 592156 )

        the IPv4 shortage is not as acute there since the US has a lot of blocks allocated to it.

        Having an IPv4 address does not help, if the party you want to communicate with does not have one. Does ARIN have enough IPv4 addresses to hand them out not only to users in the ARIN region, but also to everybody those users want to communicate with in the rest of the world?

        • by Anonymous Coward

          Why would someone in the United States want to communicate with the rest of the world?

      • by Alomex ( 148003 )

        The US doesn't have to be first in everything,

        Actually the US is first in nearly nothing, particularly if you prorate things per capita.

        If you think about it, more likely than not, a small country that has placed special emphasis on X will easily beat the US where because of sheer size is harder to clean up. What is remarkable is in how many categories America ranks in the top 10.

      • by cobbaut ( 232092 )

        The US is number 4 in a chart with 5 countries, just add Belgium and the US is 5th.

        http://www.vyncke.org/ipv6status/compare.php?metric=p&countries=ch,ro,fr,us,gb,be [vyncke.org]

      • Why is it that just because the USA isn't #1 on some arbitrary list it's "hate on the US"?

        The article doesn't even mention the USA and the summary only mentioned it at the end as a contrast because /. is a US-centric site and readers here probably wanted to know where we stood.

        The amount of people on here that immediately went on the defensive shows a scary amount of nationalism in the US. Get over it people, we aren't #1 in everything.... Accept it.

    • Re:Lags? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by JanneM ( 7445 ) on Sunday June 02, 2013 @08:34AM (#43888385) Homepage

      The linked article seems more than a little odd; I just checked Japan at the same place they link to, and it has an adoption rate of 3.13%, ahead of the US. So it seems the comparison is only among a restricted set of countries (the linked page has only five countries displayed), and not really relevant to much of anything.

      • by rvw ( 755107 )

        Germany, Japan, Luxemburg and Belgium are above 3%. So that means the US is at least 7th or lower, because I didn't check all countries.

      • The article, and the /. submission has but one purpose. To bash the US.
        It even says that right in the /. headline "US Lags at 4th".

        Take some small subset of the data, and you can show that any country 'lags'. Why isn't this titled - "South Korea, probably the most connected country on the planet, comes in at dead last with 0% IPv6 adoption" ?
        • by Bengie ( 1121981 )
          USA made the Internet, USA brags about being the "best". Anything less than 1st is "lagging".
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The largest economy in the world is the EU, not the US.

      And I'm pretty tired of this argument that its okay for the US to be lagging in so many things because they are big. The US has gobs of resources and a very high GDP per capita. As someone previously pointed out, why can't you find a city or small state with higher IPv6 adoption than Switzerland? It's not like New York is somehow being held back because Los Angeles exists.

      It's like that same tired argument that size is why bullet trains are impossibl

      • by Anonymous Coward
        The whole "we're big" thing is kinda misleading. It's not as if all the equipment is owned by the government or any single organization. This is thousands of ISPs Comcast doesn't have their monopoly yet. To use the "we're big" argument you'd have to show that all those small parts are being held up by something big and unifying. I don't see it.
      • by KGIII ( 973947 )

        I don't have much of a point really but you should Google "TSA train stations" (sans quotes). Well, maybe you'd rather not know... *sighs* I didn't do it, don't blame me. I vote third party.

      • The EU isn't a country, duh.

    • Actually they are fourth in the small selection of a few countries. I've for pure interest added Germany, and it happened that in the last data point it overtook the U.S. (although only slightly), making the U.S. at best fifth. Given that there's a large number of other countries you might add, I have no idea where the U.S. really are.

  • by JustOK ( 667959 )

    I'm still working on IP5

  • Romania! (Score:5, Funny)

    by zappa88 ( 2938615 ) on Sunday June 02, 2013 @08:00AM (#43888289)
    We are in news that's not about horse meat. HELL YEAH!
    • You just had to bring it up after we'd forgotten about it...

      No more burgers for me in the next weeks...

      • Just curious... what is it about a horse vs a cow that makes the meat wrong?

        • Just curious... what is it about a horse vs a cow that makes the meat wrong?

          Nothing, as long as horse meat is labelled as "horse meat", and the paperwork trail can be traced. The problem is when horse meat is labelled as "beef", and their isn't a full paperwork trail.

          The paperwork trail is important to show that it is "fit for human consumption". How the animal dies is important - was it put down using a barbiturate for instance. If it was, it shouldn't get into the human food chain.

          (As a vegetarian I take a neutral view as to the relative merits of horse meat vs beef - I eat

        • Nothing wrong with horse meat. Pretty tasty too (IMHO). However, misinformation, no scratch that, lies about the product is what people are upset about. If businesses are lying about that, what else are they hiding? Can they be at all trusted?
    • what about that other thing, how are the vampires in Transylvania doing?

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Nobody expected the Romanian IPv6 adoption.

  • If you RTFA you find that the 10.11% figure they are reporting is for hits Google has had from web browsers using IPv6. What's more, the article only compares a small number of countries. If you add Japan into the mix it pushes USA to 5th place.

    If you look at some of the other charts, you can see that USA is top with the most IPv6 alive prefixes, announced prefixes, allocated prefixes and web servers.

    So this is about household adoption of IPv6, not overall adoption. Without businesses providing services fro

    • by Keruo ( 771880 )
      Is this native allocations or users through tunnelbrokers?
      Your IPv6 location might vary based on the country where your tunnelbroker is hosted.

      My IPv6 network at home through HE places me as US user from googles view point, and it's annoying that they keep suggesting me to use google.com rather than the localized one.
      Native IPv6 at work on the other hand works just fine since the subnet links to our real location.
    • This is what I noticed - I looked at the charts, and it had varying numbers based on the prefixes that have been allocated, live and so on. I thought that this metric would be based on the actual traffic that is IPv6. Instead, it's based on allocations, that really says squat. The only other thing it has - web browsers vs web servers, but that's by no means the only traffic on the internet.
  • When I add Japan it is showing it above the US, making the US at least 5th.

  • If you add other countries, the US is not fourth place any more, so the chart is totally misleading.
  • Sure, eventually we'll need to move to IPv6.

    But if you look at the IP utilization there are GIANT blocks of IP addresses that are locked behind allocations determined by technology's 'big players' in what, 1981? 1990?

    The facts are that:
    1) IP addresses are not actually 'running out' anytime soon
    2) it's going to be far easier to simply re-allocate blocks that are currently unused than to force everyone to buy new hardware.
    3) in most cases today, people aren't consuming new IP's, in fact, I suspect that most o

    • by kasperd ( 592156 ) on Sunday June 02, 2013 @01:40PM (#43890321) Homepage Journal

      But if you look at the IP utilization there are GIANT blocks of IP addresses that are locked behind allocations determined by technology's 'big players' in what, 1981? 1990?

      That part is true. But back then allocations only came in three sizes. Those allocations really were of the smallest size, which would cover their need. That practice was changed soon enough to avoid problems. Slowing down the allocation of IP addresses and not having any of the already allocated addresses handed back would have given enough time, that IPv6 could have been deployed.

      The only problem was, that nobody did. People just kept going on deploying more and more IPv4 networks and ignoring IPv6. Other workarounds came along, which stretched the supply of IPv4 addresses even further. The truth is, those workarounds have caused more problems than they solved. They were not necessary in the first place, there was plenty of time to deploy IPv6. The workarounds mean that we now have a much bigger Internet that needs to be converted, which means more work, and it is more expensive. But worse than that, the workarounds are actually part of the reason transitioning to IPv6 is so damn hard. Had IPv4 been free from any NAT, it would have been easier to have IPv4 and IPv6 co-exist.

      Some people suggest those early players should hand back those addresses. It wouldn't solve any problem. It would have delayed the problem by a few months. But the problem would have returned and been just a tad worse. Also, it is a myth that those addresses are unused. Even if they are not all advertised in BGP, they may be used internally on systems, which also need to communicate with the public Internet. Hence they cannot be reused without breaking some communication. And even if they could be handed back, the amount of work it would take to ensure they are really not used plus the administrative overhead, means it is just not worth the effort. All that effort would be better spent working on a real solution.

      All of those addresses, which could possibly have been handed back would have been used already in 2011. IANA ran out of addresses in early 2011, and APNIC was growing fast at the time.

      IP addresses are not actually 'running out' anytime soon

      That's only true, because they already have. Rationing of IPv4 addresses is happening already, and it is affecting end users. The problems end users experience will get worse over time. But very few people understand the connection between the problems they are experiencing and shortage of IP addresses.

      it's going to be far easier to simply re-allocate blocks that are currently unused than to force everyone to buy new hardware.

      But that won't help. There aren't addresses to reallocate. Extrapolate the curve from before IPv4 addresses and ignore the limit. Then you'll find consumption would reach 200% before the end of this decade. No redistribution of IP addresses will solve that. Also redistribution of IP addresses is a problem in itself. Every time you break up a block and redistribute the addresses, the address space gets more fragmented. This fragmentation means more routing table entries, which consume costly CAM resources on the backbone routers. This is a side effect of stretching the utilization of addresses too far.

      Research has shown that you should not expect to utilize more than 80-90% of the bits in an address, if that address is supposed to be used for routing. That means you should not expect to utilize 32 bits of the IPv4 addresses, but only 26-29 bits.

  • Competing based on IPv6 saturation? I guess the US is doing pretty well for not even trying.

    I suspect IPv6 adoption isn't nearly as critical for the US as it is for other countries. As the US controls an obscene portion of the IPv4 address space.

  • The reason we have a low IPv6 adoption rate is because ISPs such as AT&T just don't try to upgrade. Their users want IPv6 support, but the ISPs won't deliver.
  • I would have thought the US would have been near the bottom.

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