What metrics should the Internet engineering community use to track deployment of IPv6? That was the question debated by a panel of experts at an Internet Society event held on 29 March in conjunction with the IETF meeting in Prague, Czech Republic.
The panel, entitled “IPv6: How will we know we’ve arrived?”, considered various measurements of IPv6 deployment, including traffic statistics, hardware capability, support from existing Web services, and the creation of new applications.
Leslie Daigle, chief Internet technology officer at the Internet Society, said a statistic such as having 20 percent of the Internet’s traffic using IPv6 by the end of 2011 is beyond a stretch goal. That’s because CZ.NIC, Arbor Networks, and others estimate that IPv6 currently represents around 0.1 percent or 0.2 percent of all Internet traffic.