Tr@ffic

Everyone considers IPv6 to be this brand new bright shiny thing, however, IPv6 has been around almost as long as IPv4, and the internet at large.

IPv6 was formally specified in RFC1883, published in 1995, but was the product of a two year effort to come up with the replacement for IPv4.

IPv4 and IPv6 are not mutually exclusive protocols.  They both occupy the same layer in the OSI model, built upon the previous layers, and is pretty much transparent above the higher layers.  Layer 3 is the IP layer.

As the ecommerce world has had its customers move into a primarily mobile environment, it's interesting to know that mobile and cellular data was one of the first industries to push for and utilize IPv6, as the sheer volume of endpoints (i.e. smart phones) dwarfs the amount of IPv4 addresses available to the cellular carriers.

Recent reports from Akamai show that not only are these mobile customers on IPv6, but that their experience getting to IPv4 only shops is slower than a full IPv6 available store.

To move into the present, the world needs to be able to support IPv6 end-to-end.  Dual-stacked IPv6 is an awesome first step, but it is everyone's responsibility to have native IPv6 support.

This Post was authored wholly via IPv6.