Verisign ended the second quarter of 2021 with 170.6 million .com and .net domain name registrations in the domain name base, a 5.2% increase in 12 months, and a net increase of 2.59 million during the second quarter of 2021, according to the company’s second quarter 201 results.
With autonomous driving, industrial automation, Artificial Intelligence, Virtual and Augmented Reality in 5G and the cloud era all upon us, demand for and use of internet protocol addresses is growing and evolving, and with this “foreseen evolution” IPv6 needs to be further combined with other technologies to generate ground-breaking “IPv6+” based networks.
At the end of 2019, the US government passed a new bill authorising the Department of Defence to sell around 200 million Internet Protocol 4th version addresses. Several blocks of IPv4 addresses are planned to be sold out in ten years. Vincentas Grinius, CEO of Heficed, explains how these changes might affect the IP address market
[news release] The US Department of Defence announced the sale of around 200 million IPv4 addresses in multiple large and medium blocks. According to Vincentas Grinius, CEO of Heficed – the IP address infrastructure service provider, the new addresses would decrease the current IPv4 pricing, but would not solve the IPv4 shortage for certain market players.Â
How would this Department of Defence sale affect the IP address market in the upcoming years?
Potential Buyers – Do Small Companies Stand a Chance?
New release of IPv4 addresses will be sold in big and medium-sized blocks, and since the Department of Defence has a deadline, they are focusing on large buyers. Large companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, or Google are always looking to grow their IP address databases, which would make them potential buyers.
âThe biggest incumbents in the market are always looking to buy more IP addresses. As the number of IPv4 addresses is facing depletion, and we are slowly transitioning to IPv6, corporations are more eager to collect as many IPv4s as possible. At the same time, released addresses are contained in large bulks, which doesnât give many chances for smaller buyers and brokers to obtain their fair share. Therefore, I believe that we will end up with a few major corporations acquiring everything.â – Vincentas Grinius expressed his concerns.
With new releases entering the market, companies are promised to see lower IPv4 prices. However, if only a few major buyers acquire it, the market might not face significant price changes.
âDue to IPv4 address exhaustion, prices have been rising for a while now. As the average price in 2015 was around 6 dollars, in 2018, the price for a single IPv4 address reached 17 dollars, and itâs predicted that this number will only grow and double in upcoming years. Itâs possible that the Department of Defence bill could bring positive changes and lower IPv4 prices, yet if these addresses are shared only among a few big corporations, we probably wouldnât even notice it.â – said Vincentas Grinius.
Many IP addresses are linked to spamming, hacking, and similar vicious activities. Companies create blacklists to contain abuse, but the more addresses enter the internet, the more difficult it gets. Vincentas Grinius believes that potential buyers – large corporations could help solve the issue, âAlthough every address holder can abuse their usage rights, it becomes more challenging to control it with the surge of new addresses. However, if only large and well-known corporations obtain new IPv4 addresses, the chances of IP address abuse can be monitored easier.â
New IPv4 release might shake up the market. However, it possesses both positive and negative outcomes. New IPv4 addresses postpone the transition to IPv6 and give us more time to prepare. Yet with more affordable and accessible options, the chances of IP address abuse might increase. And if large incumbents acquire most of the blocks, we might not see significant changes.
ABOUT HEFICED
With its headquarters in London and server locations in every continent, Heficed is a network engineering and infrastructure service offering IP Address Market platform, including cloud solutions and bare-metal servers. At the core of Heficedâs business is its worldâs first automated IPv4 address infrastructure engineering platform, which streamlines the process of leasing and managing IP addresses. www.heficed.com
IPv6 penetration grew by a quarter (25.85%) in 2018 to take Viet Namâs ccTLD to 13th place globally for IPv6 adoption while domain names under management reached 465,890, an increase of 8.3% compared to the end of 2017. Since 2011, .vn has been one of top 10 ccTLDs for growth in the Asia Pacific.
The growth in registrations in 2018 came on the back of a new registration procedure and management system for .vn that came into effect in September 2018. The simplified registration process means itâs much easier for to register domain names in Viet Namâs country code top level domain but still comply with Vietnamese regulations and laws.
The growth in IPv6 deployment of 25.85% means there are now more than 14 million IPv6 users including 6.5 million of FTTH subscribers and 3.1 million of mobile users. Viet Nam was ranked the second place in ASEAN, the 6th place in Asia Pacific and 13th place globally for the highest IPv6 adoption rate.
2018 also saw VNNIC, the .vn ccTLD registry, continuously improve the stable connection, security and safety for the national DNS .VN system and other critical information infrastructures operated by VNNIC. DNSSEC was extended to all national DNS servers and the national .vn DNS system is connected with DNS ROOT and international DNS systems.
By the end of 2018, the Viet Nam National Internet eXchange (VNIX) system had 20 members peering over exchange points in Ha Noi city, Da Nang city and Ho Chi Minh city with the total connection bandwidth reaching 269 Gbps. 13 of VNIX members deployed dual-stack network. Among them, CMCTI, VNPTNET and Viettel are 3 ISPs having the highest amount of traffic over VNIX which are 51GB, 50GB and 42GB respectively which increased by about 34% compared to their traffic over VNIX in 2017.
On 7 August, VNNIC maintained and extended the validity of the ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certification standard within the scope of operation and management of essential network systems in Viet Nam including the national DNS .VN system, the Internet eXchange system and Internet data centers (IDCs) in Ha Noi city, Da Nang city and Ho Chi Minh city.
In 2019, VNNIC plans include accomplish the Viet Nam National IPv6 Action Plan, continuously promote the use of internet resources in Viet Nam, and strengthen the security of critical information infrastructures including the national DNS .vn and VNIX system, improve the effectiveness of internet resources management policy and develop regulations for the auction of one and two-character .vn domain names and to innovate VNIX operating system following international standards.
Deployment of IPv6 has increased 3,000% since the beginning of World IPv6 Launch 5 years ago, according to a report released by the Internet Society this week.
The State of IPv6 Deployment 2017 shows IPv6 deployment is increasing around the world, with over 9 million domain names, out of over 330 million, and 23% of all networks advertising IPv6 connectivity.
Google reports 37 countries exceeding 5% of traffic, with new countries being added weekly. Akamai reports 7 countries whose IPv6 traffic exceeds 15%. In Japan, all three major mobile networks, NTT, KDDI, and Softbank, are deploying IPv6 this year, and in India, Reliance JIO’s deployment has driven measures of IPv6 traffic in the country to exceed 20%. The IPv4 Market Group comments that it expects IPv6 user count to exceed 50% world-wide in 2019, and with that, the start of the decline of the IPv4 address market.
The report also finds over 25% of the Alexa Top 1,000 websites are reachable using IPv6 with some networks now IPv6-only internally (e.g. JPNE, T-Mobile USA, SoftBank), and some major networks are now majority-IPv6 (e.g. RelianceJIO, Verizon Wireless, SkyBroadcasting, XS4ALL).
IPv4 is also slowly being turned off as some organisations in the process of turning off IPv4 within their networks and/or data centres to reduce network complexity and cost (e.g. T-Mobile, Facebook, LinkedIn).
For those who will have to move to IPv6, and haven’t yet started, the Internet Society’s core recommendations are to: (a) start now if you haven’t already, (b) use established RFP requirements like RIPE-554: Requirements for IPv6 in ICT Equipment, and (c) take advantage of existing IPv6 deployment information including the Internet Society’s Deploy360 Program.
The IPv6 protocol came out of a recognition, reported on by Frank Solensky to the IETF in August 1990, that the allocation rate of IPv4 address space was such that the Internet would run out of address space in less than five years. While this took longer, IPv4 numbers are scarce with the 5 Regional Internet Registries having no IPv4 addresses to allocate, retaining retain space only for allocation to new market entrants.
To download the State of IPv6 Deployment 2017 report from the Internet Society, go to:
https://www.internetsociety.org/doc/state-ipv6-deployment-2017
The US National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), who was responsible for overseeing the IANA transition to a global multistakeholder oversight is now reopening a consultation on how to boost IPv6 adoption. With IPv4 addresses as âscarce as henâs teethâ the NTIA recognises the imperative for IPv6 implementation and use.
The consultation originally opened on 18 August seeking public comments and input on the benefits, costs and challenges experienced, as well as any insight into additional incentives that could aid future adoption, implementation and support of IPv6. In response to requests for additional time in which to comment, the NTIA has extended the closing deadline for submitting comments to 17 October.
The NTIA is specifically seeking comments from adopters and implementers of IPv6 as well as any other interested stakeholders to share information on the benefits, costs and challenges they have experienced, as well as any insight into additional incentives that could aid future adoption, implementation, and support of IPv6. After analysing the comments, the Department intends to aggregate input received into a report that will be used to inform domestic and global efforts focused on IPv6 promotion, including any potential NTIA initiatives.
Even the father of the internet would do things differently if he were creating the internet all over again. At a recent conference, Vint Cerf said he would have started with 128-bit addresses from the start.
“If I could have justified it, putting in a 128-bit address space would have been nice so we wouldn’t have to go through this painful, 20-year process of going from IPv4 to IPv6,” Cerf, who is now Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist, told an audience of journalists during a press conference on 22 September at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Germany, according to the IDG News Service. Cerf said in hindsight he would have also like to have added public key cryptography.
“I doubt I could have gotten away with either one,” said Cerf according to the report, who won a Turing Award in 2004 and is now vice president and chief internet evangelist at Google. “So today we have to retrofit.”
While it couldn’t have been envisaged at the time, it soon became obvious the 32-bit addresses were inadequate.
The report continued:
The 128-bit address space, for instance, “wouldn’t have seemed realistic back then,” he said. Particularly given the effort’s experimental mind-set at the time, “I don’t think we could have forced that.”
There actually was debate about the possibility of variable-length addresses, but proponents of the idea were ultimately defeated because of the extra processing power associated with them, he explained. “Because computers were so expensive back then, we rejected the idea.”
As for public key cryptography, the notion had only recently emerged around the time the internet protocols were being standardized back in 1978.
“I didn’t want to go back and retrofit everything, so we didn’t include it,” Cerf said. “If I could go back and put in public key crypto, I probably would try.”
IPv6 became the dominant protocol for traffic from the United Statesâ four major mobile providers in July, and growth of IPv6 traffic continues apace.
At the end of 2015, 37.59 percent of their traffic was delivered over IPv6 for Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile USA, Sprint Wireless and AT&T Wireless to major IPv6-capable content providers. The most recent figure for August is close to 55 percent.
âThis is really remarkable progress in the four years since World IPv6 Launch in 2012, and the growth of IPv6 deployment in 2016 is showing no signs of abating,â wrote Mat Ford on the World IPv6 Launch blog.
For the same four networks, Akamai reported on a blog post in June that âAs of May 4th, requests to dual-stacked sites on Akamai from the top-4 US mobile networks used IPv6 around 60% of the time for Android and over 20% of the time for iPhones, with almost all of those IPv6-enabled US mobile iPhones being on dual-stacked Verizon Wireless.â
And growth is continuing apace around the world. In 2015, Mat Ford wrote in another post on the World IPv6 Launch blog, there were ânew deployments from major operators all over the globe like Elion in Estonia, TELUS in Canada, GVT and Vivo in Brazil, KPN, University of Twente and Ziggo in the Netherlands, BSkyB in the UK, SKTelecom in South Korea, Comteco in Bolivia, and Mediacom, Centurylink and Premier Communications in the USA.â
Has your organisation implemented IPv6? If so, the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) wants to hear from you. The NTIA wants to hear from all stakeholders, particularly those who have implemented IPv6, about the factors and circumstances that influence the decision to adopt and use the protocol and what NTIA can do to promote greater adoption of IPv6.
The consultation has come about as the NTIA notes âwe are on the verge of an explosion in the number of Internet-connected devices, from smartwatches to connected refrigerators, furniture and thermostats. Some experts predict that there will be as many as 200 billion connected devices around the world by 2020, or about 25 devices per person.â
Some of the questions the NTIA is asking are: What are the benefits of and obstacles related to implementing IPv6? What factors contribute to an organizationâs decision to implement IPv6? What is the anticipated return on an IPv6-related investment? How long does the planning process for IPv6 implementation take, and what are the different types of costs involved?
A posting on the NTIA website by Ashley Heineman, Telecommunications Policy Specialist, Office of International Affairs goes on to say:
Many of those devices will need an IP address to connect to the Internet, but the legacy Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) supports only about 4.3 billion IP addresses. Current demand has all-but-exhausted the global supply of IPv4 addresses. Luckily, the Internet technical community has been developing the next-generation Internet Protocol for nearly two decades. Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) offers 2128 IP addresses â thatâs more than 340 undecillion addresses, or 340 followed by 36 digits.
The pace of IPv6 adoption has picked up recently, but only about a third of the Internet services in the United States are IPv6 capable. As IPv4 addresses become more scarce, companies and other organizations that have yet to transition to IPv6 may find it difficult to expand their Internet presence.
Many of those devices will need an IP address to connect to the Internet, but the legacy Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) supports only about 4.3 billion IP addresses. Current demand has all-but-exhausted the global supply of IPv4 addresses. Luckily, the Internet technical community has been developing the next-generation Internet Protocol for nearly two decades. Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) offers 2128 IP addresses â thatâs more than 340 undecillion addresses, or 340 followed by 36 digits.
The pace of IPv6 adoption has picked up recently, but only about a third of the Internet services in the United States are IPv6 capable. As IPv4 addresses become more scarce, companies and other organizations that have yet to transition to IPv6 may find it difficult to expand their Internet presence.
For more information and the source of the above, see:
https://www.ntia.doc.gov/blog/2016/ntia-seeks-input-it-develops-initiatives-increase-ipv6-adoption
[news release] Akamai Technologies, Inc., the global leader in content delivery network (CDN) services, today released its First Quarter, 2016 State of the Internet Report. Based on data gathered from the Akamai Intelligent Platformâ¢, the report provides insight into key global statistics such as connection speeds, broadband adoption metrics, notable Internet disruptions, IPv4 exhaustion and IPv6 implementation.
Data and graphics from the First Quarter, 2016 State of the Internet Report can be found on the Akamai State of the Internet site and through the Akamai State of the Internet app for iOS and Android devices. State of the Internet Report-related discussions are also taking place on the Akamai Community.
âLive sports will be at the forefront this summer as we prepare for the games in Brazil, with expectations that this yearâs events will be watched by more online viewers than ever,â said David Belson, editor of the State of the Internet Report. âGlobal connection speeds have more than doubled since the summer of 2012, which can help support higher quality video streaming for bigger audiences across even more connected devices and platforms.â
Global Average Connection Speeds and Global Broadband Connectivity
IPv4 and IPv6
Mobile Connectivity
Each quarter, Akamai publishes a âState of the Internet â Connectivityâ report. This report includes data gathered from across the Akamai Intelligent Platform about attack traffic, broadband adoption, mobile connectivity and other relevant topics concerning the Internet and its usage, as well as trends seen in this data over time. For additional information on the metrics in the report and how they are analyzed, please visit akamai.me/sotimetrics. To learn more and to access the archive of past reports, please visit https://www.akamai.com/us/en/our-thinking/state-of-the-internet-report/global-state-of-the-internet-connectivity-reports.jsp. To download the figures from the First Quarter, 2016 State of the Internet Report, please visit: wwwns.akamai.com/soti/soti_q116_figures.zip.
As the global leader in Content Delivery Network (CDN) services, Akamai makes the Internet fast, reliable and secure for its customers. The company’s advanced web performance, mobile performance, cloud security and media delivery solutions are revolutionizing how businesses optimize consumer, enterprise and entertainment experiences for any device, anywhere. To learn how Akamai solutions and its team of Internet experts are helping businesses move faster forward, please visit www.akamai.com or blogs.akamai.com, and follow @Akamai on Twitter.
This Akamai news release was sourced from:
https://www.akamai.com/us/en/about/news/press/2016-press/akamai-first-quarter-2016-state-of-the-internet-connectivity-report.jsp