May 7, 2012 archive

New Statistics on IPv6-enabled BitTorrent Peers In P2P Networks

IPv6-enabled BitTorrent PeersEric Vyncke continues to crank out interesting visualizations of IPv6-related statistics.  We’d previously written about his daily IPv6 statistics, but now he’s out with new statistics about IPv6 usage within BitTorrent P2P networks.

Based on work documented in an Internet Draft, draft-vyncke-ipv6-traffic-in-p2p-networks, Eric’s interactive map is interesting to use.  At the time of this blog post, using the map you can see the following percentages of BitTorrent peers in these countries:

  • France:  3.9%
  • Romania:  1.64%
  • China:  1.09%
  • US:  0.7%

As to why the focus on BitTorrent, Eric notes:

Please note that RFC 3484 (address selection) does not apply to BitTorrent as peers are identified only by IP addresses, this, means that Teredo and even the mostly historic 6to4 are used when available. Therefore, this maps shows how many end-users could contact an IPv6-only server.

It is interesting research as another way to seek to understand the availability of IPv6 connectivity.  Kudos to Eric for making these statistics available, and it will be very interesting to see how this trends over time, particularly with World IPv6 Launch happening in just under a month on June 6, 2012!