IPv6 celebrates its 20th birthday by reaching 10 percent deployment

Twenty years ago this month, RFC 1883 was published: Internet Protocol, Version 6 (IPv6) Specification. So what's an Internet Protocol, and what's wrong with the previous five versions? And if version 6 is so great, why has it only been adopted by half a percent of the Internet's users each year over the past two decades?

First the good news. According to Google's statistics, on December 26, the world reached 9.98 percent IPv6 deployment, up from just under 6 percent a year earlier. Google measures IPv6 deployment by having a small fraction of their users execute a Javascript program that tests whether the computer in question can load URLs over IPv6. During weekends, a tenth of Google's users are able to do this, but during weekdays it's less than 8 percent. Apparently more people have IPv6 available at home than at work.

World-wide IPv6 deployment as measured by Google. (credit: Google)

Google also keeps a map of the world with IPv6 deployment numbers per country, handily color-coded for our convenience. More and more countries are turning green, with the US at nearly 25 percent IPv6, and Belgium still leading the world at almost 43 percent. Many other countries in Europe and Latin America and even Canada have turned green in the past year or two, but a lot of others are still stubbornly staying white, with IPv6 deployment figures well below one percent. Some, including China and many African nations, are even turning red or orange, indicating that IPv6 users in those countries experience significantly worse performance than IPv4 users.

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