Indian IPv6 deployment

Isp-Column

I had calls with a couple of friends over this week and somehow discussion IPv6 deployment came up. “How much has been IPv6 deployment in India now in 2020” is a very interesting question. It’s often added with - “how much of my traffic will flow over IPv6 once it is enabled”?

 

Game of numbers

There is a drastic difference in IPv6 deployment depending on which statistic we are looking at here in India. There can be a bunch of factors based on which we can try to judge IPv6 deployment:

  1. How many operators are offering IPv6 to end users?
  2. How many end-users are on IPv6?
  3. How’s the content available on IPv6 in terms of a number of IPv6 enabled websites?
  4. How’s the content available on IPv6 in terms of traffic volume over IPv6?

First two and last two points are related and point towards from vertically opposite ends. (Call it good or bad) the fact of high centralisation. There has been an ongoing centralisation of mobile operators and in-country like ours they connect a very large number of end-users. The number of fixed-line networks has increased considerably but at the same time in proportion to a number of mobile users they user base growth has been much lower.

On the content side like everywhere else in the world, there’s a lot more centralisation of content. Many of my Indian ISP friends tell me that Google + Akamai + Microsoft + Netflix + Facebook + Cloudflare is way over 75% of their traffic. Think about it, that’s just 6 AS number out of 68000+ odd networks in the world as per BGP routing table. Thus by traffic profile, we are looking at 0.0014% networks serving 75% of content traffic. The reason for such centralisation is actually beyond network and more around the success of products of these organisations followed by factors like the winner (or top 3) gets it all in most of these domains.

 

Reports

For eyeball traffic APNIC IPv6 stats for India (source here) as well as Hurricane Electric’s IPv6 progress report (source here) give us some numbers:

  1. Very few fixed-line operators are offering IPv6 but on the mobile side - a large number of mobile networks are offering IPv6. Jio was on IPv6 since launch and as traffic increased, Airtel as well as Vodafone + IDEA also significantly increased their deployment. On fixed line, it’s just Jio + ACT broadband with any sizable IPv6 footprint. BSNL + Airtel have virtually no deployment. There might be some other network in the list but it’s off the radar.

  2. There are a lot more end users on IPv6 than despite the small number of networks offering it because of the large mobile user base. On Jio 80%+ user base, on Airtel, it’s 45%, on Vodafone & IDEA (merged company but still separate ASNs) it’s close to 50%. That’s the number of users who are connecting over IPv6 when given option of IPv4 and IPv6 as tested by APNIC. That number is huge!

  3. Around 98.5% of TLDs (top-level domain names like .com, .net etc) are IPv6 enabled. For .com & .net domains, only 7% of the domains have an AAAA record (compared to ones having an A record). Most of the numbers are much lower if we look at the content side of IPv6 (ignoring the traffic volume).

  4. If we look at the content players with IPv6 and include the traffic volume numbers then it’s way higher. It is estimated that globally somewhere between 20-30 top ASNs carry 90%+ traffic and almost all of those top 20 are IPv6 enabled.

 

What do all these numbers actually mean?

  1. If you are an eyeball network in India and you deploy IPv6, you can expect way over 70-80% traffic (by volume) on IPv6.

  2. If you are a content network/datacenter in India and application is targetting to home fixed-line / enterprise network, expect a rather low amount of IPv6 traffic but would be rapidly increasing as more fixed-line networks deploy.

  3. If you are a content network/datacenter in India and content hosted at your end attracts mobile traffic, you can expect way over 50%-60% of that mobile traffic over IPv6.

 

Some additional reasons to consider deploying IPv6

  1. In India, ISPs need to maintain carrier-grade NAT logs of the translations. If one is doing dual-stack, a large part of traffic will flow over IPv6 saving on those logging requirements.

  2. For ISPs, it will save you from significant strain on CGNAT device.

  3. For content network/webmaster/datacenter - IPv6 will help in delivering your traffic outside of (often) congested CGNAT paths.

Happy IPv6ing! :)