NRO dismayed at sluggish IPv6 adoption

A large proportion of businesses and ISPs are still doing nothing to migrate to IPv6, despite the dwindling number of IPv4 addresses, according to research from the Number Resource Organisation (NRO).

The findings from a global study of over 1,500 organisations from 140 countries discovered that 16 per cent had no plans to work on IPv6 migration.

Around a third of ISPs have yet to offer IPv6 to businesses, while another third are seeing only 0.5 per cent of their traffic being carried over IPv6 networks.

"It's somewhat frightening that 16 per cent of businesses or ISPs are doing nothing to address the issue of the depletion of IPv4 addresses," said NRO chairman Axel Pawlik.

"We're probably going to run out of addresses at some point next year and, although there was some good news in this report, such as 40 per cent of ISPs actively working towards IPv6 adoption, I am dismayed at some of the other findings."

Over half of respondents highlighted cost as the main barrier to IPv6 implementation, but the NRO warned that the cost of deployment will grow as the need to migrate becomes more imperative.

"There will be some islands of IPv4 addresses left in the future that can talk to one another, but with everyone else on IPv6 any businesses left on the old technology will find it very hard to manage," Pawlik warned.

Many companies are not addressing the issue as they believe that network address translation can make IPv4 addresses last longer, but Pawlik said that this is a complex and confusing way to work.

However, he expects to see a flurry of IPv6 adoption in the coming months when organisations are no longer able to put off upgrading.

Specific figures from UK respondents gave a mixed picture. Of 44 UK ISPs surveyed, 29 are considering promoting IPv6 uptake to customers, 11 are not promoting IPv6 uptake and four said 'maybe'. Only two are not considering tak ing an assignment of IPv6 addresses.

V3.co.uk contacted BT and Virgin Media Business for their positions on the IPv6 issue. BT was unable to comment, while Virgin Media Business had not responded at the time of publication.