The New Zealand IPv6 Task Force has compiled a series of ‘latest news’ items relating to IPv6 in New Zealand.
Read more below:
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New Zealand IPv6 Task Force supports World IPv6 Day
The New Zealand IPv6 Task Force put its weight behind World IPv6 Day in June, engaging in several promotional activities to help spread the IPv6 adoption message locally.
World IPv6 Day was a global event sponsored and organised by the international Internet Society (ISOC) and supported by numerous large content providers. The intent of the day was to encourage participants to test deployment of IPv6 on their public facing websites.
It ran over 24 hours, from 00:00 to 23:59 UTC (from 12 noon New Zealand time) on 8 June 2011.
World IPv6 Day aimed to motivate all organisations to present their services on both IPv4 and IPv6 for the entire 24 hour period. On the day major providers including Google, Facebook and Yahoo were among many global firms who took part.
Global impact of World IPv6 Day
Alongside the major content providers, over 400 other organisations signed up with ISOC . It is encouraging to note that many of their websites remain IPv6-enabled today.
www.worldipv6day.org/participants/index.html .
Note: ISOC maintains a list of over 700 websites that were already IPv6-enabled.
For a before-and-after overview of the IPv6 status of participating organisations visit www.mrp.net/WorldIPv6Day.html .
One of the interesting aspects about World IPv6 Day is that if everything went according to plan, then there would be no significant change in Internet experience for the average user. In this regard World IPv6 Day was an unmitigated success. Some of the largest content providers on the Internet were able to enable IPv6 on their services with little to no impact on their customers.
According to Wikipedia, “the Day passed according to plan and without significant problems for the participants. Cisco and Google reported no significant issues during the test. Facebook called the results encouraging, and decided to leave their developer site IPv6-enabled as a result. But the consensus was that more work needed to be done before IPv6 could consistently be applied”.
For its part, the New Zealand IPv6 Task Force:
• Registered with ISOC as a supporting organisation and strongly encouraged all New Zealand content providers and ISPs to also take part.
• Spoke at a video seminar entitled ‘IPv6 through the crystal ball. What a future with IPv6 might look like’.
• Spoke to NZ Tech Podcast about World IPv6 Day and the critical importance of local IPv6 adoption. http://nztechpodcast.com/nz-tech-podcast-episode-14
• Repeated its survey of IPv6 readiness in New Zealand, with preliminary results made available on World IPv6 Day.
• Promoted the ‘IPv6 Check’ widget, accessible at www.ipv6.org.nz
• Worked with Task Force members FX Networks and Fujitsu NZ to live-stream the dawn of World IPv6 Day (NZT) with an IPv6-enabled web-cam.
• Task Force member TelstraClear made its main websites accessible via IPv6 on World IPv6 Day. It also assisted with enabling IPv6 on the Flybuys website.
• ICT services firm Gen-i (on behalf of Task Force member Telecom) launched a target dual-stack test webpage for World IPv6 Day, along with a link to an information page – www.ipv6test.co.nz.
• On World IPv6 Day there was a 400 percent increase in visits to the Task Force’s website and a significant increase in the amount of IPv6 traffic traversing the .nz name space. The namespace graphs are available at www.ipv6.org.nz/2011/06/09/world-ipv6-day-sees-increase-in-v6-traffic-to-nz
• There was also a steady stream of social media on Twitter and local media coverage as a result of Task Force press releases. Articles ran in print, audio and television: www.ipv6.org.nz/2011/06/08/nz-media-coverage-world-ipv6-day
Surveys indicate increased IPv6 awareness
Awareness of IPv6 has reached a near universal level among New Zealand’s large public and private sector organisations, but there are still significant challenges in attaining widespread IPv6 adoption, especially amongst government agencies.
94 percent of respondents to a recent survey of public and private sector Chief Information Officers (CIOs) are ‘adequately to well-informed’ about what IPv6 is and how it works. This compares with 72 percent in 2010 and 54 percent in 2009.
The third annual ‘CIO survey’ was conducted earlier this year by the New Zealand IPv6 Task Force in an effort to assess the IPv6-readiness of New Zealand’s largest organisations.
The IPv6 Task Force also recently surveyed New Zealand telecommunications carriers and service providers to understand how well prepared they are to cope with the IPv6 transition.
Disappointingly, only 46 percent of respondents to that survey provide IPv6-enabled products and services. But in a nod to the importance of IPv6, 75 percent have a test environment for IPv6 and 71 percent have made efforts to ‘evaluate’ IPv6 support and features in consumer premises equipment such as home routers and modems.
Read more at:
www.ipv6.org.nz/2011/07/14/media-release-surveys-indicate-increased-ipv6-awareness
A full summary of the survey results is available at:
www.ipv6.org.nz/2011/07/14/ipv6-task-force-surveys-enterprise-industry-readiness
NZ Government updates list of IPv6-accessible sites
New Zealand’s Department of Internal Affairs has updated its list of Government websites that have a quad A record. The updated list includes the Tauranga City Council site and some other websites maintained by the City Council, including City on it’s Feet, Baycourt Community and Arts Centre and Historic Village on 17th.
The DIA says “many other linked Tauranga City Council web sites are also IPv6 accessible”.
The list also notes several dual-stacked websites maintained by New Zealand’s Ministry for Culture & Heritage, including:
• Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand
• New Zealand History
• 28th Maori Battalion
• ANZAC
• Vietnam War
• Cultural Well-Being
IPv6 features at CIO Summit & NetHui 2011
The New Zealand IPv6 Task Force maintained a presence at the CIO Summit and NetHui events in late-June, sharing a sponsor booth with NZICT. This proved an ideal opportunity to network with New Zealand CIOs and the Internet community.
NetHui 2011 featured a discussion session facilitated by IPv6 Task Force Convenor Murray Milner. The session – entitled ‘IPv6: How real is the issue and what’s the role of government and industry’ – was well-attended by a group of curious NetHui participants.
Formal notes from the session are available at:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JaxlP9dcd_GG2AtwJJnbNGpAKUtRbAX4Arlc6lKPnro/edit?pli=1
A video recording of the session is available at the following link, from 49:00 onward:
http://www.livestream.com/nethui2011innovation/video?clipId=pla_94bf799a-7626-43cc-a9a0-c8f9203ac420&utm_source=lslibrary&utm_medium=ui-thumb
ANZIA Awards – enter your IPv6 initiative now!
Are you a New Zealand-based individual or organisation that has implemented or promoted IPv6 lately? If so, then the NZ IPv6 Task Force encourages you to enter the upcoming ANZIA Awards.
The Australia and New Zealand Internet Awards (ANZIAs) are a collaboration between InternetNZ and auDA. The awards are an annual event celebrating the achievements of organisations, businesses and individuals that have made significant contributions to the development and use of the Internet in Australia and New Zealand.
This year the ANZIAs features a category devoted to initiatives that facilitate or promote the uptake of IPv6 in New Zealand or Australia.
Read more at: www.ipv6.org.nz/2011/07/11/anzia-awards-enter-your-ipv6-initiative-now
Tauranga City Council enables IPv6
IPv6 has been enabled on 15 websites hosted at Tauranga City Council (TCC). The Council uses FX Networks to connect to the Internet, which provides connectivity to native IPV6. In addition to the IPV6 enablement of its web-facing services, changes to equipment on the Council’s internal LAN are being made to enable IPv6.
Old switches nearing the end of their life are being replaced with equipment from Extreme Networks offering full support for IPV6. Some internal networks across the organisation have been enabled for IPv6. Dual-stack technology is being used to enable both IPV4 and IPV6 use.
Read more at: www.ipv6.org.nz/2011/06/07/tauranga-city-council-enables-ipv6
DTS goes native
In late May, Wellington-based Internet Service Provider DTS announced it was natively IPv6-capable (internationally). DTS made the announcement via Twitter.
DTS has also adopted IPv6 on its critical internet facing systems including core, border, and edge routers, DNS, mail and web systems.
Asia-Pacific region leads IPv6 adoption
Global research firm Ovum claims that enterprise customers in the Asia Pacific region feel more “urgency” to move to IPv6 than those in other parts of the globe.
That urgency has largely been driven by the recent announcement from APNIC (Asia Pacific Network Information Centre) that the free pool of IPv4 addresses in the Asia Pacific region has effectively been exhausted, it says.
“The Asia-Pacific is the top growth region in the world, manufactures many electronic devices and many companies see this as their key expanding region. And many enterprise customers are doing business with a vendor/customer in this region which will influence by the faster pace of IPv6 adoption globally,” says Ovum.
Read more at: www.ipv6.org.nz/2011/07/14/asia-pacific-region-leads-ipv6-adoption-ovum
APNIC launches IPv6 tracker
The Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) has launched a new tool to provide information on the IPv6 readiness of websites in networks.
“It is a simple script that utilizes Google Analytics to measure the visitors on both your and your clients’ websites,” says APNIC.
“The reporting will allow you to make better decisions on improving IPv6 readiness within your networks. APNIC will produce a report on the aggregate data collected from this tracker to help provide you with information on the progress of IPv6 deployment in the Asia Pacific region”.
Broadband Forum and IPv6 Forum Work Together to Accelerate Global Activation of IPv6
In a statement in June the Broadband Forum and the IPv6 Forum announced their cooperative effort to empower the successful adoption of IPv6 in broadband deployments worldwide.
This effort will “[create] the ecosystem that will ensure the continued success of the Internet as new applications and user expectations grow beyond the bounds of the IPv4 protocol,” says the statement.
The two organisations are collaborating to incorporate Broadband Forum network and testing specifications into the IPv6 Forum’s Certification Program.