Google’s latest IPv6 measurements show the percentage of its users connecting to Google services over IPv6 passed 40% for the first time on 30 April this year. This is a significant milestone in the ongoing deployment of IPv6 services to Internet users all around the globe.
Crossing this latest threshold now means that IPv6 use by Google users has grown from 35% to 40% in a year. It’s interesting to note that a large amount of this annual growth appeared over the course of a single week in March 2022 when the peak for IPv6 users shifted from 38% to nearly 40%. This relatively large increase in such a short period of time could have been the result of a large, new IPv6 deployment coming online, or could have been caused by some shift in the availability of Google services over IPv6.
It’s nearly 10 years since the advent of World IPv6 Launch on 6 June 2012, when major Internet Service Providers (ISPs), home networking equipment manufacturers, and web companies around the world permanently enabled IPv6 for their products and services. There’s still quite a lot more work required to ‘complete’ the rollout of IPv6 on the global Internet, but it’s encouraging to see continued — and occasionally very rapid — growth in the right direction. It surely can’t be much longer before IPv6 users of large service providers like Google are in the majority. That really will be a milestone worth celebrating!
Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash