Asian companies have ‘head in the sand’ in IPv6 adoption

Most enterprise customers are continuing to resist pressure from the internet and telecoms industry to migrate to IPv6.

But according to a release by Ovum, enterprise customers in the Asia-Pacific (AP) region, on the other hand, have felt the most urgency to move to IPv6. The new internet protocol IPv6 is being marketed as essential to the future growth of the internet as it opens up a wealth of new address space for web portals, devices and applications.

This urgency in AP has been prompted by the announcement by Asia Pacific Network Information Centre that the free pool of IPv4 addresses has been effectively exhausted. There are still some IPv4 addresses in reserve. But this is the first regional announcement and it won’t be the last. Ovum expects it will be followed by other regions soon but there is more to this story than IPv4 address availability.

The Asia-Pacific is the top growth region in the world, manufactures many electronic devices and many companies see this as their key expanding region. And many enterprise customers are doing business with a vendor/customer in this region which will influence by the faster pace of IPv6 adoption globally.

However, in a new report* the independent telecoms analyst claims that pressure from players such as telecoms and internet service providers is falling on deaf ears and enterprises in other regions other than AP see no need to start the transition to IPv6.

“There may be a degree of ‘head in sand’ mentality among most enterprise customers, but our research stands in glaring contrast to the industry’s efforts to promote IPv6 over the past several years. Furthermore our research suggests that many enterprise customers think they are already using IPv6, when they are not.”
Metrics carried out by industry players have revealed that IPv6 traffic counts for less than three per cent of all internet traffic today.

According to the report, one of the major reasons for global enterprises’ lack of urgency is that there are still plenty of IPv4 addresses available, meanwhile issues such as a lack of return on investment and more pressing IT priorities are also playing a part. “Most enterprise customers assume that having plentiful IPv4 addresses alleviates any need to make the move; it is just not that simple,” commented Sapien.

According to the report, there are some triggers that will motivate enterprises to make the move. For instance, the growing number of new consumer devices, such as smartphones, that will be assigned IPv6 addresses, and the new web applications that will be accessed by these devices. Asia-Pacific leads the world in IPv6 adoption, enterprises (and their many suppliers) doing business within this region will be influenced to follow suit.