Task Force releases ‘metrics’ report, highlighting state of IPv6 in New Zealand

The New Zealand IPv6 Task Force has today released its latest ‘metrics’ report, showing the state and extent of the nation’s IPv6 Internet.  A PDF version of the report is available below:

IPv6 Metrics Analysis – Report #1: Q2 2012

The Report highlights a number of key trends, including:

• New Zealand’s service providers show a strong level of readiness: almost one third of peerings to the rest of the world and each other use IPv6; there is a choice for all sizes of businesses and organisations for their IPv6-capable ISP.
• 4 of the top 5 sites visited by New Zealanders are available over IPv6, with the 5th, Trade Me, working towards IPv6 deployment later in 2012
• Government (4%) and ISPs (17%) lead the way in NZ making themselves visible on the IPv6-Internet, but our health, banking and education sectors are lagging.
• NZ’s actual levels of IPv6 traffic show middling performance, at c. 0.2% of total traffic. This is ahead of many, on par with economies like Australia, but behind leaders like Japan (1.5%) and France (4.5%).
• Wider purchasing and implementation of IPv6 ISP services and capable CPE (customer premise equipment) are now the largest hurdle to greater IPv6 adoption: the uptake of new UFB-based services provide the opportunity for New Zealand to progress.

Commentary

The IPv6 story among New Zealand ISPs is a strong one, that shows good signs of continuing to strengthen. We have a globally high level of v6 peering at an Autonomous System level. There is choice for all sizes of organisations between ISPs offering native IPv6 connectivity, with several ISPs in active trials for the roll-out of IPv6 services later in 2012, or early in 2013.

Note: no conclusions have been drawn in the metrics report about the share of traffic coming into the .nz name servers, pending further technical investigation on the collection method.

The push made by World IPv6 Launch has really made a difference to service and content availability: 4 of the 5 top sites visited by New Zealanders are now available over IPv6 with the 5th (Trade Me) expected to be so later in 2012.

Disappointingly, none of the popular NZ-based sites (mostly media and banks) are available over IPv6 yet and we don’t anticipate that changing in the next 12 months (with the exception of Trade Me).

New Zealand’s ISPs are doing well, with 17% having web services reachable over v6 (reflecting the strong showing of service provider readiness highlighted above). Government is the other sector with a strong showing, with 4% of sites reachable over v6: recent implementations by NZ Defence Force and the Ministry for Primary Industries bring the first “large Ministry”presence.

We expect government presence to grow steadily in the coming 12 months due to a combination of edict and movement to centrally procured (and IPv6-capable) internet and hosting services.

New Zealand is running at about 0.2% of internet traffic being native IPv6. This is comparable to economies like Australia, but behind leaders like the US and Japan (between 1.0% and 1.5%). Truly high levels of penetration are strongly associated with the deployment of new infrastructure, eg by Free in France (4.5%) over the past few years, and in developing economies, eg Romania (8.1%).

Given popular content and services are now available, we see the widespread purchase and switch-on of IPv6 services by homes and businesses (along with new CPE) as the last big hurdle to IPv6 traffic growth.