IPv6 Usage Reaches Historic 50% Across Google Services

Source: Slashdot

Background

IPv6 was dismissed early on as a headache‑inducing, hard‑to‑implement complication that would hardly ever gain any traction — despite offering 2^128 possible addresses, solving all network number assignments in one fell swoop. The tried‑and‑true IPv4 protocol, with its familiar 123.456.789.123 format from the 1980s, provides roughly 4.3 billion addresses in theory and about 3.7 billion in practice. The rapid growth of the Internet soon exhausted those numbers. The IANA entity that controls the North‑American IPv4 space ran out of addresses around 2011, while its European counterpart RIPE NCC exhausted its pool in 2019. Registries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America ran out of IPv4 addresses during the same period.

Recent Milestone

For the first time, IPv6 usage briefly reached 50 % across Google services. According to Tom’s Hardware, a momentary peak on 28 March showed that half of worldwide users accessed Google over an IPv6 connection, marking a historic first for the protocol.

Global Adoption

• APNIC reports that IPv6 is now used by 43 % of the world, with Asia and the Americas approaching the 50 % mark.
• Cloudflare shows that about 40 % of traffic is carried over IPv6, an impressive figure when measuring actual transferred packets rather than just counting addresses.