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IPv6 traffic numbers [was: Re: OT - Vint Cerf joins Google]

  • From: Simon Leinen
  • Date: Mon Sep 12 10:00:27 2005

[CC'ing Stanislav Shalunov, who does the Internet2 weekly reports.]

Marshall Eubanks writes, in response to Jordi's "8% IPv6" anecdote:
> These estimates seem way high and need support. Here is a counter-example.

While I'm also skeptical about the representativeness of Jordi's
estimates, this is a bad counterexample (see below about why):

> Netflow on Internet 2 for last week 

> http://netflow.internet2.edu/weekly/20050829/

> has 6.299 Gigabytes being sent by IPv6, out of a total 383.2
> Terabytes, or 0.0016% This is backbone traffic, and would not catch
> intra-Campus traffic, nor would it catch tunnel or VPN traffic,
                        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^        ^^^^^^^

Wrong.  What you see here is ONLY tunnel traffic, because the number
is for IPv6-in-IPv4 (IP protocol 41) traffic.

Netflow for IPv6 isn't widely used yet.  Our own equipment doesn't
support it, and I don't think the Junipers used in Abilene do, either
(someone please correct me if I'm wrong).

> but it is suggestive.

Yes, but it's also irrelevant, because Abilene has native IPv6, so
there is little incentive for sending IPv6 tunneled in IPv4.

> According to the graph
> http://netflow.internet2.edu/weekly/longit/perc-protocols41-octets.png
> the most I2 IPv6 traffic was in  2002, when it was almost 0.6% of the total. 

I would assume that that was before IPv6 went native on Abilene.

> It is hard for me to imagine that the situation for commerical US
> traffic is much different.

I'm sure there's less
> There may be similar statistics for Geant - I would be interested to
> see them.

I'll look up the GEANT numbers in a minute, stay tuned.
-- 
Simon.