• The percentage of DNS queries that request a quad-A record (vs. an A record).
Already, there has been a steady increase in the percentage of DNS queries over the IPv6 protocol at the two root name servers that Verisign operates. Labeled "A root" and "J root," these are two of the 13 name servers that requesters can contact to get the IP addresses of name servers for top-level domains. From May 2011 to May 2012, the percentage of queries to the A and J root name servers received over IPv6 has tripled, from just over 1% to between 3% and 4%. (This current rate is consistent with what we're aware of for other root name servers.) The percentage of queries over IPv6 to the name servers for .com and .net is still steady at just under 1%. Occasional fluctuations can be due to trial deployments of IPv6 at various parts of the Internet, or other variations in the mix of IPv4 vs. IPv6 traffic.
The steady increase is encouraging, because it means that more and more requesters are starting the hierarchical process of "resolving" a domain name into an IP address with an IPv6 communication to a root server. In a typical DNS deployment, the requesters are recursive name servers, acting on behalf of end-consumers that ultimately interact with the named resources. The increase reflects IPv6 adoption by recursive name servers and the networks they reach the root servers through. It doesn't necessarily mean that the named resource, the end-consumer, nor the networks they connect through support IPv6, though such transitions would be likely to follow, if not already in place.
It will be interesting to see what happens in the lead up to on June 6. Verisign will share insights at and we are very interested in gaining insights from the larger Internet community into questions such as: Will there be a significant acceleration in the various IPv6 adoption indicators? What are other observers seeing? With its open architecture, there is no single observation point for all impacts of IPv6 adoption and activity on the Internet. Assembling the larger picture will depend on the information shared by the Internet's many service providers and stakeholders.
As the current early adoption of this grand upgrade of network communications transitions into the mainstream, we can expect to see much larger percentages of domain names with IPv6-enabled name servers, of DNS queries received over IPv6, of requests for quad-A records, and ultimately broad adoption of IPv6 communications overall. Will 2012 be the year?