In his regular monthly spot on PING, APNIC’s Chief Scientist Geoff Huston discusses the current state of worldwide IPv6 uptake.
Despite remarkable national achievements within the Asia Pacific region — such as India, which is now over 80% IPv6-enabled according to APNIC Labs, and Viet Nam, close behind at 70% — the global rate of IPv6 adoption remains slow. When adjusted for population and Internet penetration in developed economies, the uptake has shown a largely linear trend since 2016. In some places, such as the United States, IPv6 capability peaked naturally at around 50% in 2017 and has since flattened, with no indication of achieving full deployment there or in many other economies.
Geoff takes a high-level view of the logistic supply curve, considering early adopters, early and late majorities, and latecomers. He sees no clear signal that a definite endpoint — where the transition to IPv6 will be ‘complete’ — is in sight. Instead, we are likely to see continued dual-stack operation, running both IPv4 (increasingly behind carrier-grade NATs deployed within ISPs) and IPv6.
There are success stories in mobile (as seen in India) and in broadband with central management of the customer router. However, it seems that with the shift in the criticality of routing and numbering to a more name-based steering mechanism and the continued rise of Content Distribution Networks, the pace of IPv6 uptake worldwide has not followed the expected pattern.
Read more about the IPv6 transition at the APNIC Blog:
- The IPv6 transition (Geoff Huston, APNIC Blog November 2024)
- The transition to IPv6: Are we there yet? (Geoff Huston, APNIC Blog May 2022)
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