Statistics for Canada – IPv6 test
IPv6 in Canada
These graphs show the evolution of default protocol, v6 address types, and average bandwidth in Canada over time.
They are generated using the data collected by the connection test page, and are updated on a monthly basis.
Overall IPv6 and v4 protocol support in Canada
This graph shows the evolution of IPv6 support vs IPv4 for all our connection test.
The numbers are percentages, so we can expect almost 100% of hosts supporting IPv4 with a slow growth for IPv6.
Top 25 internet service providers for IPv6 in Canada (Oct 2020)
ISP
IPv6 tests count
Communications Canada Communications rricane Electric LLC3124. TekSavvy Solutions, Communications Mobility Communications Groupe Videotron Ltee709. B2B2C Mobility Tech Inc. 2414. M247 Server Solutions, nologie Corporation722. 10VPN mcast Cable Communications, LLC6
IPv6 and v4 protocol support in Canada (unique addresses)
This graph shows the evolution of IPv6 support vs IPv4 for unique users of our connection test.
The numbers are percentages, so we can expect a slow growth towards 50% v4 / 50% v6.
Top 25 internet service providers for IPv6 in Canada (unique addresses, Oct 2020)
Unique IPv6 addresses
Communications Canada Communications rricane Electric Mobility Inc. 1295. TekSavvy Solutions, Communications Communications Groupe Videotron Mobility Sas2112. M247 nologie Tech Inc. 616. B2B2C, Ocean, Communications522. Everythink Innovations Limited423. 10VPN mcast Cable Communications, Internet3
Default browser protocol in Canada
This graph shows the percentage of browsers that default to IPv6 vs. IPv4 when visiting the ipv6-test connection test.
Hopefully, in the not so distant future, the v6 part will grow taller than the v4 one.
@[email protected]
Default browser protocol in Canada (dual-stack users)
This graph shows the percentage of browsers that default to IPv6 vs. IPv4 for users that have both v4 and v6 connectivity.
Usually a system will default to v6 when it’s available, but in some cases with tunneled connections, v4 stays the default.
Top 25 internet service providers for IPv6 default in Canada (Oct 2020)
Test count
IPv4
IPv4%
IPv6
IPv6%
Communications oopa500. 0%5100. 0%3. Everythink Innovations Mobility nologie Communications Canada Communications Communications Communications mcast Cable Communications, LLC6116. 7%583. 3%15. TekSavvy Solutions, rricane Electric Mobility Groupe Videotron Ltee701724. 3%5375. 7%19. 10VPN Ocean, Internet6466. 7%233. 3%25. M247 Ltd231982. 6%417. 4%
IPv6 address types in Canada
Here you can see the evolution of address types over time, and measure usage of 6to4 and Teredo tunneled connectivity.
It should be noted that because 6rd works with native addresses, it cannot be detected here as tunneled. This is also the case with VPN based tunnels.
Downstream bandwidth in Canada
This graph illustrates the connection speed gap between IPv4 and IPv6, numbers represent v6 speed as percentage of v4 speed.
The lower IPv6 speeds are often caused by tunneling overhead or insufficient v6 connectivity or peering capacity at ISPs.
Top 25 internet service providers for IPv6 speed in Canada (Oct 2020)
IPv6 average
1. Everythink Innovations Limited5589. 0 Communications Inc. 148302. 9 Canada10228. 1 Communications Canada Inc. 978192. 5 Groupe Videotron Ltee70160. 3 Communications Inc. 218132. 6 Communications Inc48296. 3 Mbps8. TekSavvy Solutions, Inc. 22167. 3 rricane Electric LLC31253. 1 Mobility Inc. 15652. 4 Cable5851. 0 Mbps12. 10VPN Hosting746. 3 Corporation743. 2 Communications729. 7 nologie 1228. 0 Sas5912. 6 Tech Inc. 245. 3 oopa50. 0 Mbps19. B2B2C Inc680. 50. 0 Ocean, LLC50. 0 mcast Cable Communications, LLC60. 0 Systems80. 0 City50. 0 GmbH90. 0 Mbps
@[email protected]
The State of IPv6 in Canada | BGPmon
Two weeks we published this article, in which we looked at the status of IPv6 deployment worldwide. We saw that by looking at the number of networks (Autonomous Systems) that announce both IPv4 and IPv6 prefixes, the global IPv6 deployment rate is around 8%.
In this article we’ll take a close look at IPv6 deployment in Canada. From the previous article we know that Canada has an IPv6 deployment rate of 8%, which is the same as the global average. It is however significantly lower than for example New Zealand, Japan and many European countries.
Residential IPv6 services in Canada
Today TekSavy, an independent Canadian service provider, is the only ISP in Canada offering experimental IPv6 services to customers. This is pretty much a global trend, as we see most IPv6 deployments and service offerings are mainly offered by large carriers, down to regional ISP’s, business providers and lastly residential users.
The reason for this is easy, high costs. Customer premise equipment (CPE), i. e. cable/ DSL modems provided by residential providers, are typically low end devices. They do not support newer technologies such as IPv6 or even the use DNSSEC. As a result, in order to provide IPv6 services to residential users all of the routers/modems at the customer have to be replaced. This of course is a significant investment for the providers. In the core of these provider networks, more high-end and typically more modern equipment is used, the majority of these routers have supported IPv6 for quite a while.
So if IPv6 development mainly happens in the core, let’s take a look at the Canadian IP Transit market and how IPv6 has change the market relationships. We’ll start by taking a look at the IPv4 market followed by more detailed analyses of the IPv6 market.
Top 10 IPv4 providers
Let’s first take a look at the view of the Canadian transit market with our IPv4 glasses on. For those familiar with the Canadian market, the list below contains few surprises. The list consists of major Canadian Telco’s and Cable providers as well as most of the global Tier1 providers.
According to the table below Cogent the leads the pack, by providing transit to 159 Canadian networks (autonomous systems). However we should probably take into account that AS577 (Bell Canada) and AS6539 (GT-BELL) are both owned by Bell. After GT, Group Telecom, was bought by Bell both networks operated as separate networks, but they’re all Bell customers. Having said that, the real market leader is bell with 197 transit customers.
From the list below the only Transit provider that’s not a Telco / Cable or Tier1 provider is Peer1. Peer1 is a hosting / transit provider based out of Vancouver and provides transit to 49 Canadian Networks.
The table below shows a list of providers that provide IPv4 Transit to Canadian IPv4 networks.
Num of Customers
AS number
Network Name
159
174
COGENT Cogent/PSI
113
577
BACOM – Bell Canada
105
15290
ALLST-15290 – Allstream Corp.
102
852
ASN852 – Telus Advanced Communications
88
3356
LEVEL3 Level 3 Communications
84
6539
GT-BELL – Bell Canada
6327
SHAW – Shaw Communications Inc.
64
701
UUNET – MCI Communications Services, Inc. d/b/a Verizon Business
63
3257
TINET-BACKBONE Tinet SpA
57
6453
GLOBEINTERNET TATA Communications
50
3549
GBLX Global Crossing Ltd.
49
13768
PEER1 – Peer 1 Network Inc.
Top IPv6 providers
Now let’s take a look at the Canadian transit market with our IPv6 glasses on. The situation now looks quite different. The first thing to notice is that non of the Canadian Telco’s or Cable providers are represented in this list. With the exception of Peer1 and Canarie this list has no Canadian providers at all.
Hurricane Electric is the market leader in the Canadian IPv6 Market. No real surprise, as they are the global leader. Globally, Hurricane Electric provides transit to three times as many networks as the runner up Global Crossing. Other major players are AS3257 Tinet (formerly known as Tiscali), Tata, Global Crossing, Level3 and NTT America.
The only Canadian Transit networks on this list are Peer1 and AS6509, Canarie. Canarie is the Canadian Research and Education (R&E) network, comparable to for example Internet2 in the US and Geant/Dante in Europe. Although TATA communication has some Canadian roots (it used to be TeleGlobe) It’s fair to say that the Canadian IPv6 transit market is dominated by non Canadian companies, specifically large global carriers.
In fact most of the Canadian transit providers that are market leaders in IPv4 do not provide transit to any IPv6 network (Telus, Bell, Allstream). The exceptions are Peer1 (providing transit to 271/BCNET, 11290/ Cogeco Cable and 36483/ gossamer Threads) and Shaw that provides transit to AS271/BCNET.
The table below shows a list of providers that provide IPv6 Transit to Canadian IPv6 networks.
36
6939
HURRICANE – Hurricane Electric, Inc.
16
12
6
6509
CANARIE-NTN – Canarie Inc
4
2914
NTT-COMMUNICATIONS-2914 – NTT America, Inc.
3
6762
SEABONE-NET TELECOM ITALIA SPARKLE S. p. A.
4436
AS-NLAYER – nLayer Communications, Inc.
2
15412
FLAG-AS Flag Telecom Global Internet AS
Research and Education
Research and Education (R&E) networks globally have been early adaptors and in Canada Canarie is no exception as they have been running IPv6 for many years. If we zoom in a little more into the Canadian R&E community we see that in the world of IPv4, fourteen Canadian networks appear behind AS6509 (Canarie). In the world of IPv6 that’s seven networks. This would make for a score of 50% in our IPv6 deployment scale. Significantly better than the average Canadian Ipv6 deployment score of 8%.
IPv4
IPv6
Origin AS
Yes
271
BCNET-AS – BCnet
376
RISQ-AS – Reseau Interordinateurs Scientique Quebecois (RISQ)
No
611
CANET11-AS – University of Toronto
841
CANET2-ASN – Canadian Research Network
2884
NAP-THREE – RA-NAP
3359
U-ALBERTA – University of Alberta
7860
UPEI-AS – University of Prince Edward Island
8111
DALUNIV – Dalhousie University
10965
MRNET – MRNet
10972
NF-CANET2 – Memorial University, NF CAnet 2 gigaPOP
15296
NETERA – Netera Alliance Inc.
26300
SASK-RESEARCH-NETWORK – SRNet Saskatchewan Research Network Inc.
26677
ORION-ASN – ORANO
26806
SASK-RESEARCH-NETWORK-2 – SRNet Saskatchewan Research Network Inc.
Please keep in mind that these results are based on BGP data, this means that if the AS is not visible in the data, it’s considered as not IPv6 ready. If a network uses provider aggregated address space, the actual more specific might not be visible because of aggregation. In those cases the networks will be considered as not IPv6 ready.
Conclusion
The good news for Canada is that compared to the rest of the world, Canada’s IPv6 deployment ratio of 8% is on par with the global average. It’s however significantly lower than countries it normally likes to compare itself with.
Traditionally the IP Transit market in Canada was heavily dominated by Canadian Companies. However these companies have missed the boat in the new world of IPv6. Most of the IPv6 ready Canadian networks are now forced to by transit from the larger global carriers. As more and more transit RFP’s have IPv6 as a mandatory requirement, this could very well result in loss of IPv4 customers as well.
State of IPv6 Deployment 2018 – Internet Society
Key points
IPv6 deployment continues to increase around the world. In the six years since World IPv6 Launch[*] levels of IPv6 deployment in networks and service providers all over the globe have increased dramatically.
Over 25% of all Internet-connected networks advertise IPv6 connectivity.
Google reports 49 countries deliver more than 5% of traffic over IPv6, with new countries joining all the time.
Google reports 24 countries whose IPv6 traffic exceeds 15%.
Figure 1 – Countries with IPv6 deployment greater than 15%
In some countries, major mobile networks are driving IPv6 adoption. In Japan (NTT – 7%, KDDI – 42% and Softbank – 34%), India (Reliance JIO – 87%) and the USA (Verizon Wireless – 84%, Sprint – 70%, T-Mobile USA – 93%, and AT&T Wireless – 57%) national mobile networks have very high levels of IPv6 deployment. Some mobile networks are taking the step to run IPv6-only to simplify network operations and reduce costs.
IPv6 has emerged from the “Innovators” and “Early Adoption” stages of deployment, and is now in the “Early Majority” phase. The price of an IPv4 address is near its projected 2018 peak, and cloud hosting providers are starting to charge for IPv4 addresses while leaving IPv6 services free from additional charges for address space.
Increasingly, IPv4 is an unnecessary cost, and a speculative asset. An IT department or CIO that is faced with purchasing IPv4 addresses has reason to ask whether the expense is worth the value. The short answer is that it increasingly is not. Even when not faced with that decision, the company would do better, in the long term, to sell the address space it has and use the money to fund IPv6 deployment, connecting to an upstream ISP that will use translation mechanisms to connect to remaining IPv4-only content.
For those businesses and networks that have yet to make the upgrade, the best time to start the IPv6 deployment process is now and there are many resources available online to help.
Operator case studies
Reliance JIO, in India, started deploying IPv6 after its local Internet registry ran out of IPv4 address space. Reliance has been forced to purchase IPv4 address space as a result, but for business reasons prefers not to. As of February 2017, Reliance reported that about 90% of its LTE customers are using IPv6, and represent about 80% of their traffic. This is driven, they say, by their principal content partners, Google, Akamai, and Facebook, who deliver their content only using IPv6 in that network. Reliance activated over 200 million subscribers with IPv6 connectivity in just 9 months, between September 2016 and June 2017.
Verizon Wireless proactively deployed IPv6 even though they had an existing IPv4 network. Per reports, they had at least 70 internal instances of the same private address space, and found themselves spending effort and money on the resulting network complexity; IPv6 deployment was a solution that simplified their network and reduced the cost of operating it. Over 80% of traffic from Verizon Wireless to major online content providers now uses IPv6. T-Mobile USA is similarly in the process of turning IPv4 off within their mobile network, operating IPv6-only.
Facebook reports that they are in the process of turning IPv4 off within their datacentres; IPv4 and IPv6 from outside comes to their load balancers, and behind them it is only IPv6. The effect has been operational improvements and innovation in their software. Other companies, including LinkedIn and Microsoft, have similarly stated an intention to turn IPv4 off within their networks.
Universities have also been early deployment test locations and early adopters. Virginia Tech, for example, deployed IPv6 in a trial location in 2004, and then expanded it throughout their campus system. In 2016, they reported that 82% of their traffic volume used IPv6. Similarly, Imperial College London reports that they started experimenting in 2003, secured commercial service in 2010, and in 2016 had SLAs for IPv6 service equivalent to their IPv4 service – averaging 20-40% of their traffic. Interestingly, they report that a significant proportion of their high-energy physics collaborations, such as with CERN, depend on IPv6.
Views of IPv6 Deployment
Web content
Alexa Top Million Websites: 17% with working IPv6 (up from 13% in 2017)
Alexa Top 1, 000 Websites: 28% with working IPv6 (up from 23% in 2017)
Figure 2 – Percentage of Alexa Top 1000 websites reachable over IPv6
Countries & Regions
Google reports 49 countries using IPv6 for more than 5% of their interactions with them (up from 37 in 2017). APNIC, Akamai and Facebook report similar numbers of countries accessing their services using IPv6.
Figure 3 – Countries with IPv6 deployment greater than 5%
To get a sense of the relative numbers of IPv6 users in each of these countries we can refer to APNIC data about the percentages of the total IPv6 user population geolocated to these more-or-less IPv6-enabled countries.
Figure 4 – Percentages of total IPv6 user population in countries with high levels of deployment
Special mention must be made of Belgium, the first country in the world to regularly deliver more than 50% of traffic to major content providers over IPv6.
Deployment is global: Trinidad and Tobago is among what the UN calls “Small Island States” and is a recipient of development funding. But Google asserts that nearly 20% of accesses from there use IPv6.
Nearly half of all IPv6 users on the planet today are in India where an estimated 270 million users have IPv6 connectivity to the Internet.
Of the G20 nations, 13 are in the list of nations delivering more than 5% of their traffic to Google over IPv6. The seven G20 countries that have less than 5% IPv6 measurable are China, Indonesia, Italy, Russian Federation, South Africa, Spain and Turkey.
Figure 5 – G20 Countries with less than 5% IPv6 deployment
Domain Name System (DNS)
In the root domain, which is to say the service that provides the addresses for top-level domains (TLDs) such as,,, or, there are twelve companies operating thirteen root server identities (Verisign operates two). Each of these identities is dual stacked; it has both IPv6 and IPv4 addresses.
There are 1, 543 TLDs, of which 98. 4% (1519) have IPv6 name server addresses and can be queried using either IPv4 or IPv6; an ICANN requirement of all new TLDs is that they be IPv6-capable from the day they launch.
In total, across all TLDs, there are 11, 4221, 950 registered domains with AAAA records (up from 9, 510, 719 in the 2017 report).
DNS clients use IPv6 for approximately 7% of requests seen at K Root.
IPv6 Routing
There exist 54, 154 Autonomous Systems (networks) advertised in the global BGP routing database, as seen by Hurricane Electric. Of these, 13, 947 (25. 8%) advertise an IPv6 prefix, and 13, 704 advertise both IPv4 and IPv6 prefixes. 243 networks only advertise IPv6 prefixes. APNIC also publishes a report on BGP and their numbers vary a little as the BGP database seen by any given operator differs from that seen by other operators but are approximately the same.
Backbone (Transit) ISP
Transit ISPs offering IPv6 services exist in every country, with the exception of parts of Africa, the Middle East, and China.
Broadband ISP
Many broadband ISPs have IPv6 deployed to the majority of their subscribers and send the majority of their traffic over IPv6 to major content providers. For example, Comcast is actively deploying IPv6 in the US. Per the World IPv6 Launch website, Comcast has an IPv6 deployment measurement of over 66%. British Sky Broadcasting has IPv6 deployment in excess of 86%. Deutsche Telekom (56%) in Germany, XS4ALL (71%) in the Netherlands, VOO (73%) and Telenet (63%) in Belgium all have very significant IPv6 deployment.
Figure 6 – World IPv6 Launch Network Operator Measurements
Again, we can refer to APNIC data to understand which ISPs have the most IPv6 users. India and the USA currently dominate this view of IPv6 deployment. Reliance Jio may have more IPv6 users than all other IPv6-capable ISPs combined.
Rank
ISP
Country
IPv6 Users (estimated)
1
Reliance Jio
237, 600, 764
2
Comcast
36, 114, 435
3
AT&T
22, 305, 974
4
Vodafone India
18, 368, 165
5
Verizon Wireless
15, 422, 684
6
Idea Cellular
14, 681, 694
7
Deutsche Telekom AG
14, 261, 836
8
T-Mobile USA
14, 057, 105
9
KDDI Corporation
11, 871, 952
10
Sky Broadband
11, 829, 610
11
Claro
10, 235, 805
12
Softbank
8, 613, 145
13
Orange
7, 924, 119
14
AT&T Wireless
7, 694, 881
15
Cox Communications
6, 316, 462
16
Kabel Deutschland
5, 835, 590
17
SK Telecom
5, 764, 073
18
NTT Communications
5, 596, 206
Content Networks and Data Centres
Google, LinkedIn, Akamai, and Facebook are actively deploying IPv6 within their networks, and connecting to IPv6 users outside. An interesting point is that they report that delivering their services using IPv6 appears to improve user experience in terms of download times. IPv6-only datacentres are reducing operational complexity for these very large service providers.
Mobile Wireless (Cellular)
Mobile wireless, today, is rapidly becoming an IPv6-majority market. Reliance Jio reports that about 90% of its traffic uses IPv6, driven by its major content providers. Verizon Wireless similarly reports that about 90% of its traffic uses IPv6. T-Mobile USA is among the providers in the process of turning IPv4 off. Other major cellular IPv6 providers include AT&T Wireless, Sprint, Telus, Tele2, EE, KDDI, Softbank, OTE, Rogers and many others.
Figure 7 – Major US Mobile Network IPv6 Deployment (May 2017 to May 2018)
Enterprise Networks
Enterprise operations tend to be the “elephant in the room” when it comes to IPv6 deployment; if nearly 26% of AS’s advertise IPv6 prefixes, 74% do not, and those are likely to be enterprise networks.
Larger and more tech-savvy enterprises are forging innovative paths forward. A case in point is Microsoft, which made one of the first publicly-announced purchases of IPv4 address space, reportedly purchasing 666, 000 addresses at $11. 25 per address in 2011. Per a recent blog, however, Microsoft is taking steps to turn IPv4 off, running IPv6-only within the company. Their description of their heavily translated IPv4 network includes phrases like “potentially fragile”, “operationally challenging”, and with regard to dual stack operations, “complex”. The summary of their logic is both telling and compelling:
“Hopefully, migrating to IPv6 (dual-stack) is uncontroversial at this stage. For us, moving to IPv6-only as soon as possible solves our problems with IPv4 depletion and address oversubscription. It also moves us to a simpler world of network operations where we can concentrate on innovation and providing network services, instead of wasting energy battling with such a fundamental resource as addressing. ”
In other words, for Microsoft, turning on dual stack operation and then turning IPv4 off is expected to reduce cost and introduce efficiencies. It is the most sensible business strategy.
Incentives and challenges for IPv6 deployment
As the case studies above illustrate, strong incentives for IPv6 deployment stem from the operational simplification that comes from removing overlapping address space from the network, the reduced operational costs of managing such complex networks, and the minimization of shocks to networking business that arise when additional address space is unavailable or requirements to deploy IPv6 arrive with a short time horizon.
More work is clearly required to drive IPv6 deployment in countries, some of them major industrialised nations like Russia, China, Spain and Italy, that have not seen significant levels of IPv6 deployment to date. There is also significant opportunity for increased IPv6 deployment in countries that have already seen significant deployment.
Many networks have IPv6 on their backbone but not to their end-users. Akamai reports that of the top 55 networks they interconnect with more than half have IPv6 deployment greater than 2% and these networks account for half of the residual IPv4 traffic that Akamai sees. Greater deployment efforts from this relatively small number of networks could yield huge increases in overall IPv6 deployment measured globally.
Recommendations
Get started
As noted, networks worldwide are in the process of turning IPv6 on, and some are in the process of turning IPv4 off. An interesting business opportunity exists, given the current IPv4 market, to deploy IPv6 technology and then sell a company’s IPv4 address space to pay for the conversion. In that regard, the IPv4 space is a speculative asset; as the conversion progresses, in all likelihood the value of an IPv4 address will decay over time. The projections of the IPv4 Market Group may or may not be exactly correct, but the outline of the graph is assuredly correct; they assert that we can expect IPv4 prices on the market to start to decline in 2019.
Observe common RFP requirements
As a general rule, companies deploying IPv6 technology require compliance with one or more of:
IPv6 Forum “IPv6 Readiness Logo”, Phase 1 for hosts and Phase 2 for network elements.
US Government IPv6 Profile
RIPE-554 Requirements for IPv6 in ICT Equipment
RIPE-631 IPv6 Troubleshooting for Residential ISP Help Desks
IETF IPv6 Node Requirements
There is a lot of good deployment advice
Since a number of actors have already deployed IPv6 in their networks, there is an abundance of good advice on the ‘net or in books about the process. Examples include:
RFC6782: Wireline Incremental IPv6 Deployment
IPv6 Center of Excellence (Infoblox)
IPv6 Address Planning (Coffeen)
IPv6 Essentials (Hagen)
Deploy360 (ISOC)
RIPE IPv6 Deployment Training
The Regional Internet Registries each offer training in IPv6 deployment:
AfriNIC: APNIC: ARIN: LACNIC: RIPE NCC:
[*]
Frequently Asked Questions about ipv6 isp canada
From the previous article we know that Canada has an IPv6 deployment rate of 8%, which is the same as the global average. It is however significantly lower than for example New Zealand, Japan and many European countries. … They do not support newer technologies such as IPv6 or even the use DNSSEC.Jan 5, 2011
Verizon Wireless similarly reports that about 90% of its traffic uses IPv6. T-Mobile USA is among the providers in the process of turning IPv4 off. Other major cellular IPv6 providers include AT&T Wireless, Sprint, Telus, Tele2, EE, KDDI, Softbank, OTE, Rogers and many others.Jun 6, 2018
Surprisingly to me, this is already true for many (if not the majority) of ISPs in the USA. Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Verizon, Cox, AT&T, Charter, and CenturyLink all have active support for IPv6, and that’s just the largest ISPs in the United States, representing approximately 78 million subscribers.May 4, 2016
