IPv6 Surpasses IPv4 Becoming the Most Popular Internet Protocol

IPv6: Dead or Alive?

Any quick search on the Internet for social media discussions about IPv6 will invariably uncover someone saying that “IPv6 isn’t necessary” and “IPv6 isn’t being used anywhere”.  These same discussions also accompany guides on how to disable IPv6 on mobile device operating systems.  The order must be “Don’t Disable IPv6!”

The reality is that IPv6 usage has been increasing at a very slow, but steady, pace for the last 20 years.  In fact, there are good reasons why most host operating systems come with the IPv6 protocol stack installed and enabled by default.

Hisham Ibrahim wrote eloquently about this IPv6 usage dichotomy in his “Schrödinger’s IPv6 Cat” article.  Sulyab Thottungal Valap and John Heidemann wrote “Towards a Non-Binary View of IPv6 Adoption”.  The data shows that the answer is not binary.  The truth about IPv6 lies somewhere between the perspective of the deniers, the pessimists, the proponents, and the evangelists.

 

History of IPv6 Usage

Decades ago, IPv6 suffered from an inextricable logjam situation.  Content providers weren’t IPv6-enabling their applications claiming to customers were asking for it and citing few service providers offering IPv6 connectivity.  Network infrastructure companies cited a lack of IPv6 traffic and no customer demand as a reason to not implement IPv6.  And nearly all end-users didn’t even know what the Internet Protocol was.

IPv6 required a three-legged stool condition to start becoming successful.

1 - We need IPv6-enabled Internet backbone services and end-to-end routed protocol reachability.
2 - We need IPv6-reachable applications and content.
3 - We need IPv6-enabled end-user devices connected to IPv6-enabled access networks.

Then, in the 2010 timeframe, this logjam broke free, backbone providers implemented IPv6, world IPv6 launch helped content providers confidently begin IPv6-enabling their applications, and host operating systems came with IPv6-enabled by default.  Since then, IPv6 usage has increased slowly each year.

 

IPv6 Usage Data

They say, “data wins arguments” but they also say, there are only “lies, damned lies, and statistics”.  So, let’s look at some data and then decide for ourselves.

Google has a very broad perspective of the Internet and that is useful in observing global trends.  Google has been collecting statistics on IPv6 usage globally and per country and providing those results on their IPv6 Statistics website.  For the past few years, global IPv6 adoption has only been increasing about 4% per year, but in 2025 this is tracking to over 5%.  This indicates that more end-user mobile devices and homes are establishing IPv6 connectivity.  At the time this was written, we can see that Google’s statistics show nearly 50% IPv6 usage worldwide.  The date when Google finally observed over 50% IPv6 Internet traffic was on March 28, 2026.

Annual growth of 4% to 5% may not sound like much, but we can consider the number of devices connecting to Google.  In a world with 8 billion people and 6 billion of them have Internet access, there is an estimated 16 billion Internet-connected devices.  It has been estimated that Google processes 9 million searches per day and there are around 4 billion Google users.  That would put the annual increase of IPv6-enabled devices reaching Google growing by 160 million to 200 million devices per year.

To think about this 4% growth figure in a different way, imagine if you had 10,000 IT workers, each one would need to deploy IPv6 on 16,000 devices each year.  Could you do it?

W3Techs is a group that tracks the usage of various website technologies.  They track the usage of IPv6 and they share a histogram showing the percentages of websites using IPv6 broken down by ranking.  From this graph, we see that the more popular a website is, the more likely it will use IPv6.  Popular websites use IPv6, so their applications are reachable by all users on the Internet regardless of the protocol they use or prefer.

For some tech-forward companies like LinkedIn who were early adopters of IPv6, they observe a larger percentage of IPv6 traffic.  Way back in July 2017, LinkedIn passed an IPv6 milestone and started to receive more than 50% of their traffic use IPv6.  Their IPv6 utilization has grown since then.

Facebook was also an early adopter of IPv6 and they have a webpage that shows statistics about their traffic percentages.  You can click on various countries and observe that many have greater than 50% IPv6 traffic.  You can also click on Total IPv6 Adoption and see that they observe over 43% IPv6 adoption globally.

The Internet Society (ISOC) tracks the percentage usage of beneficial protocols like HTTPS, TLS1.3, and IPv6 by websites.  The ISOC Internet Society Pulse statistics page shows 50% “Current percentage of top 1000 websites globally that support IPv6”.

ISOC England has been tracking IPv6-enabled Internet services for many years.  Their IPv6Matrix.org project tracks global IPv6-enabled content and their esthetically pleasing web interfaces allow one to drill into per-country statistics of IPv6-enabled host and even access their raw data.  Their statistics show that the global IPv6 Host percentage for the world is now over 50%.

Mat Ford, with the Internet Society, wrote an article on June 27, 2024 “Which Country Will be the Next to Reach 50% IPv6 Capability?”  Mat Ford wrote a follow-up article on June 26, 2025 “More Countries Join the Majority IPv6 Club”.  This article shows the evolution of the top IPv6-deploying countries over a one year period.  Below is a picture of the most recent set of countries with greater than 50% IPv6 traffic volumes.

The Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) has been tracking IPv6 usage statistics for decades.  Their IPv6 statistics page shows the “Use of IPv6 for World” from their global perspective.  Globally this percentage is now over 40%.

APNIC also tracks the “IPv6 Capable Rage by country (%)” and we see that many countries are colored green on this map.

If you scroll down on this APNIC IPv6 statistics page, there are now 33 countries with over 50% IPv6 capable citizens and 27 countries with more than 50% IPv6 preferred.

These statistics show that IPv6 is becoming the dominant Internet protocol and IPv4 is becoming the minority of the traffic forwarded.  Now we can see that IPv6 is at the tipping point surpassing IPv4.

 

Summary:

As Mark Twain wrote “the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”, so is the condition of IPv6.  IPv6 is very-much alive and IPv6 is an eventuality for all organizations that connect to the Internet.  Years ago we were wondering if “IPv6 is Accelerating as IPv4 is Nearing its Peak”.  Now we know that we are past the point where more IPv6 is being used than IPv4.  We also have attempted to predict “When will we stop using IPv4?”.

Today we are wondering “How long will enterprises wait to deploy IPv6?” as they continue to compress their IPv6 deployment timeline.  In the past we’ve heard enterprise IT staff utter the phrase “I’ll start on IPv6 when the rest of the world reaches 50%”.  That, along with other phrases, can be found on the “IPv6 Excuse bingo card”.  That strategy may seem like a delay tactic, but if it takes an enterprise organization several years to fully deploy IPv6, then you’ll actually end up in the technology “laggards” category in the IPv6 adoption curve.

 

Other Information on IPv6:

Hogg Networking freely provides a wealth of other information on IPv6.  This information can be accessed via the website.  If you need additional information on IPv6, then please contact me (info@hoggnet.com) and I’ll share it with you.