Swiss IPv6 Council receives Jim Bound Award

At the V6 World Congress in Paris, held from 19 - 21 March 2014, Bob Kahn handed over the "Jim Bound Award" of the International IPv6 Forum for World Leadership in IPv6 deployment to the the Swiss IPv6 Council. Switzerland is the first country  to receive this award for its "Two Digit IPv6 User Adoption".

Jim Bound was a key person in the development of IPv6. He was CTO of the International IPv6 Forum and a member of the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) IP Next Generation Directorate. In 2009, the Internet pioneer died at the age of 58. The award was named after him and was now awarded to Switzerland for "Leadership in IPv6 Deployment" in 2013 by the International IPv6 Forum, led by Latif Ladid. Switzerland was the first country to achieve a double-digit percentage of IPv6 users in April 2013. This thanks to a large-scale deployment of IPv6 by Swisscom for residential users.

Latif Ladid, president of the International IPv6 Forum said: “Switzerland under the decade-long leadership of Silvia Hagen has achieved the first double digit v6 penetration in 2013, demonstrating that v6 deployment is achievable if you get the major stakeholders to move together in this gigantic worldwide effort. Switzerland has broken the ice for the rest of the world and got the race for double digits as the new milestone for the other countries to achieve. Switzerland became the model country to emulate. This was in itself a strategic tipping point for a re-fresh deployment effort after years of stagnation. The Jim Bound Award will be the piece of recognition to get in this new v6 inflection point.”)

The President of the Swiss IPv6 Council, Silvia Hagen, was proud to receive this award from Internet pioneer Robert Elliot Kahn in Paris. "Bob" Kahn is considered one of the fathers of TCP / IP (Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol), a set of protocols, which is the foundation of today's Internet. He is also co-founder of the Internet Society (ISOC).

More than just a spearhead

Belgium and Switzerland are the international leaders IPv6 adoption. But the trend is the same everywhere, the curve of deployment is increasing strongly. The global user adoption is now above 3% - up from 0.5 % two years ago, when the Internet world celebrated the "World IPv6 Launch Day ". This means approx. 80 million IPv6 users worldwide. Currently, the number doubles every 9 months. Europe is leading, but finally even the Americans woke up : the U.S. have an adoption rate of about 6.5%  - this corresponds to about 16 million IPv6 users.

About 80 % of the top 300 AS transit networks are IPv6 enabled and already about 10 % of the top 1000 Alexa sites are dual-stack. Regarding the content providers we see the greatest need for action. John Curran, president and CEO of ARIN said: "It 's time to only do business with IT manufacturers and suppliers , who have a dual-stack site." The Swiss IPv6 Council is currently conducting a survey of Swiss top Alexa sites. The results will be presented as they become available.

Facebook goes ahead

The Facebook presentation by Paul Saab at V6 World Congress was very enlightening. After Facebook has been accessible via IPv6 from the outside for about three years, the social media network now rolls out IPv6 internally. The strategy targets an IPv6-only network, turning off IPv4 in the datacenters. Main reason: it's much easier to manage only one protocol. The internal Facebook network reaches 100% of all hosts through IPv6. 75% of the internal network traffic is IPv6.

Mobile ready for IPv6

The mobile world is ready for IPv6 services. Verizon Wireless, one of the biggest 4G LTE networks in the U.S., has switched on IPv6 by default on almost all LTE devices. T-Mobile USA offers IPv6 on UMTS, LTE and GSM. This is enabled by 464XLAT - a mechanism that allows an IPv6-only node to use IPv4-only services such as Skype on an IPv6-only network. 464XLAT is implemented in Android, iPhone will hopefully follow soon. This is an area which is still lagging behind in Europe. It will be interesting to see who will take over the lead.