Was World IPv6 Day successful? The effort to prod Internet companies to adopt the newer, beefier IP-address system garnered a lot of attention, but it's still up to companies whether or not to update their systems to the new standard.
Still, preliminary data suggest the switch is already well underway -- thanks mainly to Netflix and Facebook.
[More from Mashable: Posterized! YouTube’s 12 Most Epic NBA Dunks]
It's no secret that Netflix's streaming service accounts for a huge chunk of Internet traffic as a whole. Streaming video is by far the most bandwidth-intensive activity online, and the company's entire business model is based around it.
Facebook consistently competes with Google as the most-visited site on the Internet, and users engage with its content almost continuously.
[More from Mashable: Savvy Social Media Trailer for Tarantino’s ‘Django Unchained’]
It's no surprise that when those two sites made the switch to IPv6 for large portions of their services that IPv6 traffic as a whole spiked, according to Sandvine, a network-management company. What's more surprising is the timing: IPv6 traffic for both sites actually shot up in late May, about two weeks before the world launch:
As Sandvine's Don Bowman writes:
"Looking at the preliminary data, this year’s World IPv6 Day was not simply turned on with one big flick of a switch, 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."
While analyzing more data, Sandvine found that YouTube is actually responsible for the most IPv6 traffic online, but Google's video service has been on the IPv6 train for a while, and its contributions to the recent uptick in traffic are slight.
As the top IPv6 domain, YouTube accounts for 57.2% of traffic under the new standard, while Netflix is in second place at 32.6%.
Although Netflix has vastly increased its IPv6 traffic, Sandvine notes the company actually created a new domain specifically for the new standard. Bowman notes that this is not entirely in "the spirit" of IPv6 day, and Netflix should have operated both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic under the same domain, just with different record-keeping tags (YouTube and Facebook do this).
How do you think the IPv6 transition is going? Sound off in the comments.
This story originally published on Mashable here.
