The IETF is holding its 77th meeting this week at  Anaheim, California. The last meeting saw a huge turnout and the IEFT grabbed this opportunity to promote the new IP protocol, the IPv6.

The IETF as described by Wikipedia is,

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) develops and promotes Internet standards, cooperating closely with the W3C and ISO/IEC standards bodies and dealing in particular with standards of the TCP/IP and Internet protocol suite. It is an open standards organization, with no formal membership or membership requirements.

This Tuesday, researches have shown that even in small numbers, Internet users are already adapting to the 1995 technology. Geoff Huston of APNIC has recently announced from traffic data in the Asia Pacific that at least 1% of the Internet is using IPv6. Though not much, this is surely a good start. APNIC is the Regional Internet Registry for the Asia Pacific region.

The data provided by Huston is significantly important. It has revealed interesting facts like:

• If IPv6 is implemented, it will not affect the ISPs. Current IPv4 requires them to send a data in multiple parts of small size and IPv6 requires them to send one huge data at a time. The effective change is minimal.
• Around 6% of all networks have IPv6 enabled routers and at the current growth rates, this number will increase to 80%.

Comcast had once announced an IPv6 trial and more than 5000 people even changed their ISPs to be able to avail this offer. This shows that people are enthusiastic about IPv6. It is the existing network infrastructure which is reluctant to make this change.

As Iljitsch van Beijnum from ArsTechnica ^[1] says,

Don’t forget: we’ve used 3,026 million IPv4 addresses and have just 680 million to go, with 203 million used up in 2009. Time is running out.