Internet

IPv6 usage is climbing in Europe, while Asian countries most ready for 4K TV

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Image: Stockfresh

27 June 2014

Belgium is leading the world in IPv6 adoption, while South Korea and Japan are most ready for 4K video streaming, according to a report.

That Japan and South Korea should be preparing for the arrival of 4K video is no surprise, given that they are home to some of the world’s largest TV and flat-panel display makers.

But Belgium, a leader in the use of the new addressing system that potentially allows every person and device on the planet to have their own unique IP address? Yes, says Akamai Technologies in its State of the Internet report for the first quarter of 2014.

The report, a grab-bag of statistics about Internet traffic volumes and technology adoption, is based on traffic passing through the company’s global content delivery network (CDN).

In Belgium, IPv6 accounted for 14% of requests for Akamai-hosted sites supporting both IPv4 and IPv6, almost three times the percentage observed last quarter. Akamai attributed the increase to deployment of new IPv6 capacity by Belgian ISP Telenet. Around 24% of CDN requests from Telenet subscribers now come over IPv6, as do 24 percent from another Belgian ISP, Brutele, Akamai said. Only the operators Kabel Deutschland, in Germany, and Verizon Wireless, in the US, carried a greater proportion of IPv6 traffic, it said.

Switzerland was the next biggest user of IPv6, at 9.3% of traffic, unchanged from the previous quarter, followed by Germany, Luxembourg and Romania, all around 7.5%.

While the take-up of the latest protocols for routing and addressing traffic is low, technologies for carrying traffic faster are proving more popular.

Worldwide, the average Internet connection speed rose 24% year on year to 3.9Mb/s.

As a measure of how many subscribers in a country are benefitting from fast Internet connections, Akamai introduced a new measure into its latest State of the Internet report: 4K readiness. Given that 4K video streams consume between 10Mb/s and 20Mb/s, Akamai assumed that Internet users with connections over 15Mb/s are ‘4K ready’. It calculated that 60% of South Korean subscribers would be able to stream 4K video – no surprise given the country’s average connection speed of 23.6Mb/s – and 32% of subscribers in Japan, where the average connection speed is 14.6Mb/s, closely followed by Hong Kong, with 23% and 13.3Mb/s. The index only takes into account streaming speeds, not the availability of 4K content or 4K displays.

European countries filled out the rest of the top 10s for connection speed and 4K readiness but Belgium, for all its prowess in IPv6 deployment, didn’t make the top 10 for either measure.

Peter Sayer, IDG News Service.

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