IPv6 Was 0.4% Of Total Traffic On World IPv6 Launch Day

The amount of IPv6 traffic increased only slightly on June 6 -- touted as World IPv6 Launch day by service providers and websites -- from about 0.35% the day prior to just over 0.4% of total downstream Internet bandwidth in North America, according to an analysis by bandwidth-management vendor Sandvine.

"Looking at the preliminary data, this year's World IPv6 Day was not simply turned on with one big flick of a switch," Sandvine co-founder and CTO Don Bowman wrote in a blog post Thursday. "Instead it looks as though yesterday's date simply served as a deadline that many websites have been working towards over the past year to meet."

Comcast, Time Warner Cable, AT&T and Verizon Wireless were among the Internet service providers that enabled the next-generation IPv6 protocol for at least 1% of their users for World IPv6 Launch, while more than 2,000 websites -- including Google, Facebook, Microsoft Bing, Yahoo, AOL and Netflix -- had turned on IPv6 permanently for their main websites.

While Sandvine observed an increase in IPv6 traffic on June 6, the majority of that traffic came from just two sites -- Netflix and YouTube, Bowman noted. Netflix and Facebook enabled IPv6 in late May, which helped those sites more than double their share of IPv6 traffic in the past two weeks.

According to Sandvine, noteworthy domains that fell in the IPv6 rankings on June 6 -- as a percentage of total traffic -- included Apple.com, HBOGo.com, Limelight Networks' llnwd.net, and Sony's Playstation.net and Pandora.com.

World IPv6 Launch day was organized by the not-for-profit Internet Society.