Are Service Providers Ready for IPv6? | Incognito Blog

The report is based on findings from the recent IPv6 Readiness Survey, which was distributed to service providers of all sizes, from all regions across the globe, to gain a perspective of how prepared the industry is for IPv6.

This infographic below outlines some of the report’s main findings, including best practices such as:

• Start early, start often, keep starting until others finally see that something is going on, then start some more
• Plan to rewrite addressing plan multiple times. Tech support wants more training than it can handle, especially for the volume of IPv6-related calls
• Training for technical support to provide customer support for IPv6 is now far and away the biggest remaining hurdle for IPv6. All technical issues are either resolved or we are confident that we could resolve them in a reasonable time frame should there be a push to do so

IPv6 is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP), and it is designed to address the issue of IPv4 address exhaustion. IPv6 has a vastly larger address space than IPv4, and it also supports new features such as quality of service and security. The majority of operators are well on their way to deploying IPv6, with 90% saying they are ready or working towards full deployment. However, 10% of operators have not yet started the transition to IPv6. The benefits of IPv6 make it essential for all operators to start planning for the transition as soon as possible. With IPv4 addresses running out, IPv6 is the only way to ensure that the Internet can continue to grow and support new users and applications.

Main reasons for adopting IPv6 include:

• Running out of IPv4 (83%)
• Don't trust NAT as a long-term solution (40%)
• Lower long-term cost for IPv6 (30%)

Preferred IPv6 deployment methods include:

• Dual-stack (90%)
• 6 to 4 tunneling (35%)
• Network address translation, port translation (24%)
• Other (15%)