Happy Chinese New Year! Half a Billion Internet Users!

Global Times, a leading English news periodical in China, reported last week that the number of Internet uses in China surpassed half a billion by the end of last (calendar) year, according to the China Network Information Center. According to the report, China now counts 513 million Internet users, up from about 457 million at the end of 2010, about 12% growth.

The question I've been trying to answer is how many of these 513 million users have IPv6 addresses vs. IPv4 addresses? As yet I have been unsuccessful in answering my own question. But I've found that Mike Leber from Hurricane Electric publishes a daily Global IPv6 Deployment Progress Report. This report lists the TLDs with IPv6 (surprisingly only 85.9% have IPv6 addressable name servers today), a summary of A and AAAA records for "next level domains" for each TLD, a summary of advertised autonomous systems (ASes) for IPv6 networks, top websites available over IPv6 and more.

The top websites statistic is an interesting one, which today indicates that about 1.1% of the top 1 million websites as reported by Alexa, publishes at least one AAAA record to advertise IPv6 reachability. I view this statistic as the "supply side" of the IPv6 supply and demand relationship. The "demand side" would be represented by the number of IPv6 user devices, or my as yet unanswered question, not only for China but worldwide. At some point in time, I expect this demand side will reach a level where organizations will want to participate in supplying IPv6 content. But having visibility to this demand curve is necessary to make this decision. So I'll keep fishing around but if anyone has any suggestions, please share them!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Handy AAAA filter in BIND 9.8

The ISC introduced a pair of new configuration file options in BIND 9.8 to enable administrators to easily filter who may receive AAAA record type responses even if valid responses exist. For example, clients on subnets that do not have IPv6 network access can be excluded from receiving affirmative answers for AAAA queries. This feature provides simpler administration than the alternative mechanism using views. The first option, filter-aaaa-on-v4,defines whether the server will return AAAA records to certain clients. Such clients are defined by the address match list parameter of the second option, filter-aaaa. Note that BIND must be compiled with the --enable-filter-aaaa option on the configure command line to enable AAAA filtering. The syntax of these options is as follows: filter-aaaa-on-v4 (yes | no | break-dnssec) ; filter-aaaa {addr_match_list;} ; The filter-aaaa option identifies the address match list for which the filter-aaaa-on-v4 option is to be applied as described
Read more

Inglorious DDI

We all know how critical DHCP/DNS/IPAM (DDI) services are. Your network cannot function without them. But like most foundational elements of anything, they are certainly not glamorous...like good luck finding a home designer who specializes in home foundations. I would not be shocked should HGTV pass on my brilliant concept for a foundation building show. I suppose most people would find a show detailing footing depths and concrete pouring techniques rather boring.  Nevertheless, there are countless shows for redesigning and remodeling homes. On most episodes the foundation is out of sight, out of mind. If it's stable, no one wants to pay it attention, they just expect it to keep doing its job, supporting the structure. Once in a while a foundational issue is brought up that unexpectedly threatens to raise the budget to heighten the drama. All work stops until the issue is addressed. And you'll notice that the owner never denies paying the extra amount to fix the issue.
Read more

BIND 9.8.0 Adds DNS64 Support - Part 2 - How is it configured?

BIND 9.8.0 introduced a new dns64 option statement that can be configured within the server named.conf options block or within a view options block. Recall from a prior post that DNS64 configures a recursive DNS server to issue A record queries on behalf of a client requesting AAAA records, then appends the returned IPv4 address to a defined IPv6 prefix. This manufactured IPv6 address enables the querying host to connect to a NAT64 gateway which will terminate the IPv6 connection from the client and map it to an outbound IPv4 connection to the appended IPv4 address, completing the connection! Whew! BIND offers a number of useful parameters within the dns64 statement to control this process. The statement syntax is: dns64 IPv6_prefix { [clients {address_match_list };] [mapped {address_match_list };] [exclude {address_match_list };] [suffix IPv6_addr;] [recursive-only (yes|no);] [break-dnssec (yes|no);] }; The IPv6_prefix parameter is the prefix to which returned
Read more