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Switzerland Tops IPv6 Adoption Charts; US Lags At 4th

hypnosec writes "According to recent statistics, Switzerland has topped the IPv6 adoption charts by leapfrogging Romania, which led the charts for nearly a year. According to Google, Switzerland's adoption stands at 10.11 percent — the highest for any country. Romania, on the other hand, has an adoption rate of 9.02 percent, followed by France at 5.08 percent. Switzerland took the top position near the end of May and the primary reason seems to be Swisscom and its drive to adopt the next IP version. The U.S. stands at fourth place with just 2.76 percent adoption."

26 of 155 comments (clear)

  1. Lags? by jo7hs2 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'd say the largest economy in the world is probably not lagging by being fourth, considering the shear amount of equipment in use, and that the three preceding countries are considerably more compact. Big ships make wide turns.

    1. Re:Lags? by jo7hs2 · · Score: 3, Funny

      Sorry. That isn't a car analogy. Big trucks make wide...darn still not a car... A Lincoln Town Car doesn't maneuver like a Honda Fit. There.

    2. Re:Lags? by JanneM · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The linked article seems more than a little odd; I just checked Japan at the same place they link to, and it has an adoption rate of 3.13%, ahead of the US. So it seems the comparison is only among a restricted set of countries (the linked page has only five countries displayed), and not really relevant to much of anything.

      --
      Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
    3. Re:Lags? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The largest economy in the world is the EU, not the US.

      And I'm pretty tired of this argument that its okay for the US to be lagging in so many things because they are big. The US has gobs of resources and a very high GDP per capita. As someone previously pointed out, why can't you find a city or small state with higher IPv6 adoption than Switzerland? It's not like New York is somehow being held back because Los Angeles exists.

      It's like that same tired argument that size is why bullet trains are impossible in the US. The east coast is just as densely populated as Europe, if not more, yet there is no decent high speed link between Boston/NYC/Philadelphia/Washington. That's shorter than the French TGV line. People hate the TSA, the population density is there to support high speed rail, but the political will is not.

      PS: I think the real reason IPv6 adoption in the US is low is simply because they have so the lion's share of IPv4 blocks already...

    4. Re:Lags? by KGIII · · Score: 2

      As you should. If not then someone in power may decide they need to export some freedom to your country.

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    5. Re:Lags? by KingMotley · · Score: 2

      The EU isn't a country, duh.

  2. Romania! by zappa88 · · Score: 5, Funny

    We are in news that's not about horse meat. HELL YEAH!

    1. Re:Romania! by nschubach · · Score: 2

      Just curious... what is it about a horse vs a cow that makes the meat wrong?

      --
      Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
    2. Re:Romania! by Sesostris+III · · Score: 2

      Just curious... what is it about a horse vs a cow that makes the meat wrong?

      Nothing, as long as horse meat is labelled as "horse meat", and the paperwork trail can be traced. The problem is when horse meat is labelled as "beef", and their isn't a full paperwork trail.

      The paperwork trail is important to show that it is "fit for human consumption". How the animal dies is important - was it put down using a barbiturate for instance. If it was, it shouldn't get into the human food chain.

      (As a vegetarian I take a neutral view as to the relative merits of horse meat vs beef - I eat neither!)

      --
      You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. - Blake
  3. No kidding by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This seems to be a way to try and take a case where the US is doing decent and instead make it bad and hate on the US. So the US is 4th, out of 196 nations, some of which have very little infrastructure? Sounds like it is doing s decent job to me. Particularly since the US has a ton of infrastructure, some of it older (given that the Internet started in the US) and that the IPv4 shortage is not as acute there since the US has a lot of blocks allocated to it.

    The US doesn't have to be first in everything, it isn't a case of "anything other than first is a failure."

    IPv6 adoption is going to be a slow process. There's a lot to doing it right. In particular you find plenty of equipment either flat out doesn't support IPv6, or doesn't support it in hardware, meaning that it can't do much of it without falling over.

    1. Re:No kidding by bondsbw · · Score: 2

      the IPv4 shortage is not as acute there since the US has a lot of blocks allocated to it

      Just reposting this for emphasis. Nobody's wife or mom is complaining about IPv4 block shortage; just like anything else in life, that's really all that matters.

      --
      All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
    2. Re:No kidding by KGIII · · Score: 3, Funny

      Most of Africa could probably be switched by just buying a new home router at Amazon.

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    3. Re:No kidding by Bengie · · Score: 3, Informative

      At this point, it's not the infrastructure that needs to be updated. The backbone of the Internet has been IPv6 for almost a decade now and almost all DSL/Cable hardware is IPv6 native. The only real stuff that needs to get updated is ISPs actually configuring their hardware and end-users having IPv6 capable NAT/Routers.

    4. Re:No kidding by jbolden · · Score: 2

      AFAIK the US was never first with cellphones. Given our low population density we have lagged in cell from the beginning. If anything the last 5 years have been a period where the US had done a remarkable "catching up".

    5. Re:No kidding by Alomex · · Score: 2

      The US doesn't have to be first in everything,

      Actually the US is first in nearly nothing, particularly if you prorate things per capita.

      If you think about it, more likely than not, a small country that has placed special emphasis on X will easily beat the US where because of sheer size is harder to clean up. What is remarkable is in how many categories America ranks in the top 10.

  4. Re:Switzerland's population by Eunuchswear · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You know there are these neat things called "google" and "wikipedia".

    Switzerlands population is 8million.

    There is only one city in the US with a larger population - New York. There are only 9 cities with a population of over 1 million.

    So what is a "regular" city?

    And what is the IPv6 penetration in this city? (I.E. your argument is not just wrong but also ridiculous).

    --
    Watch this Heartland Institute video
  5. Conclusions are misleading by The+Ribena+Kid · · Score: 2

    If you RTFA you find that the 10.11% figure they are reporting is for hits Google has had from web browsers using IPv6. What's more, the article only compares a small number of countries. If you add Japan into the mix it pushes USA to 5th place.

    If you look at some of the other charts, you can see that USA is top with the most IPv6 alive prefixes, announced prefixes, allocated prefixes and web servers.

    So this is about household adoption of IPv6, not overall adoption. Without businesses providing services from servers via IPv6 the end user adoption would be pretty pointless.

    Even the article points out that using another statistics gathering method, employed by Cisco, you get different results (still showing a similar ordering of adoption in different countries, but adoption percentages are completely different). So I'd be a bit wary of trusting the statistics here.

    It is interesting to see from the charts that there's been a big push in Switzerland in the last month and how much ISPs pushing IPv6 can therefore help adoption... and that should be message to all the other ISPs out there, get on with pushing IPv6 to your customers.

  6. Why wait for IPv4 depletion? by unixisc · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Despite NAT, you still have all those complaints about your e-mail being read, your data access being known and so on. NAT is not and has never been a security mechanism on its own. There is no anonymity, since any website that receives an access request has to route that data back to the original requestor, not just to the NAT boxes in between.

    Actually, NAT is not the direct issue here. The issue is IPv4 address depletion - it's already happened at the level of the RIRs, and will next happen at the level of national registries. As that shortage hits downstream, that's when people will find IPv4 addresses being rationed, and connections being at a premium. And this is where the preparedness will make a difference: countries that are ready for it can switch relatively painlessly, as opposed to those that ain't.

    Honestly, I don't get why entities that are capable of IPv6 support, be it companies, ISPs and so on - that have all the IPv6 compatible equipment - don't start switching now. There is nothing to be gained by waiting, and the first step is in any case going to be a transition to dual-stack, not IPv6-only. So do that, and over time - maybe decades, IPv4 can start getting deprecated.

    1. Re:Why wait for IPv4 depletion? by Skapare · · Score: 2

      Someone doesn't understand what NAT does. The T part means translation. It's not needed in IPv6 anymore, but can be used for obfuscation. The NAT box keeps track of the translation so that traffic handles won't know where the real origin is. With a limited address space like you get in IPv4, which is usually just ONE address, then NAT translates everything to that address. With IPv6 NAT can translate the internal network structure into random IPv6 addresses in the standard /64 minimal assignment. So it doesn't need port numbers to keep things separate. And this can all be controlled by policy configuration.

      --
      now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
  7. Re:Come on USA! by OolimPhon · · Score: 2

    Hey! That's the combination to my luggage!

  8. Re:IPv6 is working fine, better than IPv4 by KGIII · · Score: 2

    And sometimes I wonder if you ACs are actually all just one guy talking to himself. It's actually more comfortable imagining that you are.

    --
    "So long and thanks for all the fish."
  9. Re:Switzerland's population by davester666 · · Score: 2

    Whohoo! Canada is roughly tied with the UK at 0.2%.

    I'm pretty sure that figure is inflated, as it equals 1.4 computers.

    --
    Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
  10. Re:Another "crisis" that isn't. by kasperd · · Score: 3, Interesting

    But if you look at the IP utilization there are GIANT blocks of IP addresses that are locked behind allocations determined by technology's 'big players' in what, 1981? 1990?

    That part is true. But back then allocations only came in three sizes. Those allocations really were of the smallest size, which would cover their need. That practice was changed soon enough to avoid problems. Slowing down the allocation of IP addresses and not having any of the already allocated addresses handed back would have given enough time, that IPv6 could have been deployed.

    The only problem was, that nobody did. People just kept going on deploying more and more IPv4 networks and ignoring IPv6. Other workarounds came along, which stretched the supply of IPv4 addresses even further. The truth is, those workarounds have caused more problems than they solved. They were not necessary in the first place, there was plenty of time to deploy IPv6. The workarounds mean that we now have a much bigger Internet that needs to be converted, which means more work, and it is more expensive. But worse than that, the workarounds are actually part of the reason transitioning to IPv6 is so damn hard. Had IPv4 been free from any NAT, it would have been easier to have IPv4 and IPv6 co-exist.

    Some people suggest those early players should hand back those addresses. It wouldn't solve any problem. It would have delayed the problem by a few months. But the problem would have returned and been just a tad worse. Also, it is a myth that those addresses are unused. Even if they are not all advertised in BGP, they may be used internally on systems, which also need to communicate with the public Internet. Hence they cannot be reused without breaking some communication. And even if they could be handed back, the amount of work it would take to ensure they are really not used plus the administrative overhead, means it is just not worth the effort. All that effort would be better spent working on a real solution.

    All of those addresses, which could possibly have been handed back would have been used already in 2011. IANA ran out of addresses in early 2011, and APNIC was growing fast at the time.

    IP addresses are not actually 'running out' anytime soon

    That's only true, because they already have. Rationing of IPv4 addresses is happening already, and it is affecting end users. The problems end users experience will get worse over time. But very few people understand the connection between the problems they are experiencing and shortage of IP addresses.

    it's going to be far easier to simply re-allocate blocks that are currently unused than to force everyone to buy new hardware.

    But that won't help. There aren't addresses to reallocate. Extrapolate the curve from before IPv4 addresses and ignore the limit. Then you'll find consumption would reach 200% before the end of this decade. No redistribution of IP addresses will solve that. Also redistribution of IP addresses is a problem in itself. Every time you break up a block and redistribute the addresses, the address space gets more fragmented. This fragmentation means more routing table entries, which consume costly CAM resources on the backbone routers. This is a side effect of stretching the utilization of addresses too far.

    Research has shown that you should not expect to utilize more than 80-90% of the bits in an address, if that address is supposed to be used for routing. That means you should not expect to utilize 32 bits of the IPv4 addresses, but only 26-29 bits.

    --

    Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
  11. Re:Switzerland's population by Sique · · Score: 2

    Instead of the per-ip-address stats?

    --
    .sig: Sique *sigh*
  12. Re:Fourth? Awesome! by Sique · · Score: 3, Funny

    Basicly your data means that the U.S. spend about 50% more on health care than any other country and gets just average results out of it. Must be that nationalized inefficiency in the U.S. health care system compared with the free market approach in about every other developed country.

    --
    .sig: Sique *sigh*
  13. Re:Switzerland's population by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    It's because Switzerland needs all those extra bits in which to hide money that is illegally stored in their banks.