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Hi, and sorry for the delay in responding!
This is a broad question, and I hesitated to respond when it was first asked more than 10 years ago. My mind flooded with the numerous issues that a broad question such as this raises. In the end, I settled on focusing my answer to the following, and if you need to ask more, please do so.
[I have updated this original post for May 2025]
IPv6 was officially approved as a standard by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) in December 1998 with the publication of RFC 2460. That means IPv6 was approved over 26 years ago (as of 2025). So IPv6 has been well into deployment.
IPv6 Timeline of Key Milestones
- 1994 – IETF begins work on “IP Next Generation” due to IPv4 exhaustion concerns.
- December 1995 – First IPv6 draft specification published (RFC 1883).
- December 1998 – RFC 2460 released, officially standardizing IPv6.
- 2003 – 6bone (IPv6 testbed network) reaches peak adoption for experimental use.
- June 6, 2012 – World IPv6 Launch Day, major ISPs and content providers permanently enable IPv6.
- July 2017 – RFC 8200 replaces RFC 2460, making IPv6 an Internet Standard (no longer just a Draft Standard).
- 2023 – IPv6 adoption exceeds 50% of global Internet traffic (according to Google stats).
That said there are still numerous non-IPv6 systems (like Discord for RTC/Calls), and some sites turn off IPv6 even though they can support it. Further depending on where you live (in the US I am referring to more rural service providers, likely in most other countries too, or at least certain providers (such as Swiss Fibre and Virgin Media in the UK)) you may not have IPv6 support. The non-IPv6 carriers typically have deployed CGNAT. CGNAT stands for Carrier-Grade Network Address Translation. It is a type of Network Address Translation (NAT) used by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to conserve public IPv4 addresses by allowing multiple customers to share a smaller pool of public IPs.
We are tired of the “Chicken Little” types that keep forecasting the death of IPv4. So far not one of the predictions have come true. IPv4 addresses have become extremely scarce, and there are now bidding sites to purchase IPv4 addresses (just google “IPv4 address bid” and you will find trading/selling/buying links. We also see that there is a tremendous amount of hoarding of IPv4 addresses (nothing against any of these folks but one has to wonder why MIT needs 16 million IPv4 addresses, or HP needing 32 million?).
Nonetheless, we cannot ignore the growth of the Internet IPv4 address consumption. As of 2011, there was one /8 IPv4 address block left [see details from my source], and today the only way to get IPv4 networks is to buy them on the open market [click here for an example].
Back to IPv6: You can always put this growth into perspective by looking at the global BGP table for IPv6 (the source is https://bgp.potaroo.net/v6/as2.0/index.html:
Here is Google’s view of IPv6 adoption (you can find the latest views here: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=ipv6-adoption ) :
- IPv6 on and working in Dual Stack on most operating systems. The list if when this milestone happened is as follows:
- Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar.
- Linux kernels version 2.2 and above ship with an IPv6 implementation built in. (Same goes for Solaris and many others).
- Microsoft Windows XP includes an IPv6 implementation intended for development use and trial network deployments. It has been standard in Vista and Windows 7.
- Every main operating system for computing supports IPv6 by default (Windows, Linux, MAC, etc). So it is safe to say that end users are fairly well positioned as long as they are using a newer version of their OS’s.
- The IPv6 core network has been established and is growing steadily in capacity and traffic carried. Sometimes previously called the 6bone, and sometimes previously called Internet2
- Just about every Router/Switch manufacturer has supported IPv6 for a number of years now (Cisco since 12.2(T) for example).
- Almost all applications do not care if you use IPv6 or IPv4, or both!
- The primary IPv6 users seemed to focus around Universities in the US, then more dense usage in general for Europe and Asia. Now we see major web sites such as Google and Facebook based in IPv6.
You can always use nslookup [to see more about nslookup you can go here: https://www.cellstream.com/2024/12/28/what-is-the-nslookup-command-and-how-can-i-use-it/] to see if a given web site has and supports IPv6:
Love how Facebook tries to imbed their name in hex!!
So we say if you have not already, or are not already on IPv6, it is past time to get on board with IPv6.
- Any routers or switches or gateways or firewalls, or anything else for that matter, you purchase for your network should be fully IPv6 compliant.
- You should be developing an IPv6 strategy or at least updating it (yes, we would love to help!)
- You should also start to learn about IPv6 if you are a tier 2 or tier 3 service provider. One way (forgive us blowing our own horns here) is to get into a hands on class on the subject.
We hope this helps, and I welcome further discussion!
Further Information on IPv6 can be found at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6
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