The U.S. government is leading the transition to IPv6 in the Western Hemisphere, and use of the new generation of Internet Protocols has increased sharply in the last year. And although the volume of IPv6 traffic remains small, one observer predicts that the current IPv4 protocols will become obsolete earlier than expected.
“We are probably four or five years away from IPv6 being relatively ubiquitous,” said Owen DeLong, director of professional services at Hurricane Electric, which bills itself as the world’s largest IPv6 backbone. “After that, I think IPv4 is going to become unsustainable and the people who are using it are going to be left behind.”
That will be a major shift from the current environment, in which IPv6 packets account for less than 2 percent of all Internet traffic. But going forward, almost all growth in the Internet will be in the new protocols and a tipping point is not far off, DeLong said.
