Project Description

This project is meant to provide an observatory of the IPv6 deployment in Canada. It uses various static data as well as an active probing to collect data about reachability and information about the various Canadian organizations and their presence on the IPv6 Internet

Data used to generate this report

Every day a robot fetches, archives, and processes data from the following sources:

• The WHOIS database from ARIN.
• Snapshots of the IPv6 BGP global routing table from route-views.org.
• The zone file for the .ca TLD from CIRA.

Limitations of the Data

The addressing data used in this project is provided by the WHOIS database which binds the IPv6 address ranges to organizations identified in Canada in the database. However, these address ranges may be used outside than Canada. Moreover, if a Canadian organization is not identified in Canada in the WHOIS database, then its data is not taken into account in this project statistics.

The domain data used in this project is provided by the CIRA .ca zonefile. If a Canadian organization does not use a .ca suffix for its domain, then its data is not taken into account in this project statistics.

Explanations of significant changes in the graph

Every time a significant change is found in the datasets, we take the time to review the raw data, verify it and then identify the reason behind the change. The following explains the significant changes seen:

• 2012-04-05 - 2012-04-30: An important decrease of the number of .ca domains served by DNS servers not reachable by IPv6 is seen. The investigation showed that an important registrar of a large number of .ca domains lost its IPv6 route in the global routing table, therefore making its DNS servers not reachable by IPv6 for all the domains it manages.
• 2012-05-31 - 2012-06-04: A Content Distribution Network (CDN) have enabled many of its customers IPv6 web sites.
• 2012-06-06: A large hosting provider has enabled IPv6 for its customers web sites, on the World IPv6 launch day.