IPv6 Deployment Hits 10% on Its 20th Birthday

According to The Beatles, “It was 20 years ago today, Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play.” That’s not all that happened 20 years ago. In 1983 something known as RFC 1883 was published. It dealt with “Internet Protocol, Version 6 (IPv6).” That was two decades ago. But IPv6’s time has come…slowly, but surely. (If you need a beginner’s course in IP addresses or IPv6, go to the WhatIsMyIPAddress.com Learning Center for information after reading this article. You’ll find everything you need there.) IPv6, the new-but-not-so-new IP address format, is the wave of the foreseeable future for all of us and our Internet connections—but as of January 2016, only 10 percent of Internet users are connected to the Internet through an IPv6 address. Are you? Check WhatIsMyIPAddress.com to find out. Google statistics help to uncover some interesting statistics regarding all this: How did Google know this? They calculate or estimate IPv6 connectivity by having a fraction of Google-connected users run a JavaScript program on their computers, which then tells Google if the computer can connect to websites with the IPv6 protocol. Google found out that during weekends, about 10 percent of their users had IPv6 connections, while only 8 percent of users had IPv6 connections during the week. Google’s conclusion was that more people have IPv6 connections at home than at work. How is IPv6 deployment shaping up worldwide? Google has developed a color-coded map that shows how our continents and countries are coming along with adopting the IPv6 protocol. (See map below.) Countries that are making progress are colored green. Areas that are doing poorly by comparison are orange or red in color. According to the color array: It’s important to know that a current IPv4 protocol/version address and an IPv6 address don’t perform any differently as far as users are concerned—a connection is a connection. What matters to the world (especially to technology companies and Internet Service Providers in particular) is that there aren’t any more new IPv4 addresses to assign to computer users, as well as to the millions of devices that aren’t computers (such as scanners) that need them. The supply has been exhausted. IPv6 will fix all that…eventually. There will be plenty of those addresses for all time. However, over the past four years, IPv6 deployment has increased at a snail’s pace: Sure, it seems that there’s nowhere for those numbers to go but up, but it’s still not likely to zoom up so fast. The 90 percent of computer users who don’t have (access to) IPv6 connectivity—whoever and wherever they are—might be using the tried-and-true protocol a bit longer. Look at it this way: If a new cable company came on the scene and wanted to connect millions of new customers, they would have to set them up with IPv6 addresses. And that means they’d have to make sure their entire network infrastructure was IPv6-ready—and their customers would need to be up to speed too, connectivity-wise. As it turns out, networking experts have devised ways to slowly introduce IPv6 in a way that allows it to work with IPv4 simultaneously—but that’s not an ideal or long-term solution. And it’s definitely not the future. According to one source, here’s what an IPv6-compatible and efficient network would need to look like before IPv4 can go riding off into the sunset for good: You can understand why corporations and ISPs everywhere simply waited to see what was going to happen when that day arrived, when IPv4 addresses would all be gone. Taking all of the above into account, it’s fairly amazing that 10 percent of Google users were actually able to connect with the protocol of the future…as it celebrated its 20th birthday.