YouTube Rolls Out IPv6 Support Sending Traffic Through the Roof

IPv4 addresses are running out and, while it's not exactly an emergency yet, most companies and providers have been slow in deploying support for the 'next-generation' version of the Internet protocol, IPv6. Things got a major boost recently, though, as YouTube seems to have quietly introduced IPv6 support at the production level. YouTube is one of the largest sites in the world and certainly one of the biggest consumers of bandwidth, so the move was accompanied by a huge surge in IPv6 traffic, as PC World reports.

Google hasn't said anything specific so far, but it’s known that its ‘IPv6 team’ has been working on building support for the protocol on YouTube. Reports from several ISPs, though, confirm the move. IPv6 traffic related to YouTube started coming in on Thursday and has remained steady since then, indicating that it's not just a test. The traffic spike has been significant, in some cases by a factor of 30 to one.

Apparently, the YouTube UI servers don't seem to have support for IPv6 yet, but the video and image data centers, which account for the bulk of the traffic, are sending traffic over IPv6 to the ISPs and users which have deployed support.

Google already has extensive support for IPv6 and has enabled the protocol for many of its existing products, including Google Search. But, while Google Search may get more visitors, YouTube uses up a lot more bandwidth so this latest move is the biggest for the company and probably the biggest it's going to undertake in the future as well, as Google doesn't have any other service comparable to YouTube in terms of traffic.

The move has been welcome by industry people, as it's a clear sign that IPv6 adoption is moving forward. The need to switch from the older but widely used IPv4 comes from the fact that IP addresses are running out. Using IPv4 yields a maximum theoretical number of 4,294,967,296 (2^32) possible addresses. Some of these are reserved so the actual number of available addresses is lower. With the Internet growing at an increasing pace, these addresses have been mostly assigned. IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses, as opposed to 32-bit ones, leading to 2^128 possible addresses, more than enough for several decades of growth.