Improved IPv6 networking in 2007

I mentioned earlier that IPv6 allocations took off in 2007. From 2006 to 2007, more than double the number of North American organzations got IPv6 space allocated to them. But are those organizations actually deploying their new IPv6 allocations? It seems they are. Hurricane Electric did a study of IPv6 deployment from September 2006 - September 2007. They measured the number of IPv6 networks (using entries in the BGP table), the average distance between IPv6 networks (in terms of autonomous system path length), and the latency of IPv6 compared to IPv4 using pings.

They found a 50% increase in the number of IPv6 networks in 2007. The average AS path length between IPv6 networks dropped by 22% (leading to better-performing routing). Finally, they found that in half of their cases, IPv6 was as fast or faster than IPv4. So much for the myth that IPv6 networking is always slower than IPv4!

Get the report here. It's an interesting read. They also have a neat website with daily updates comparing IPv6 deployment to IPv4.