New report looks at the state of IPv6 deployment

The Internet Society has released the ‘State of IPv6 Deployment 2018’ report, which looks at the progress made in the deployment of Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) across countries, networks, and service providers around the world. Over 25% of all Internet-connected networks advertise IPv6 connectivity, and the top 10 countries using the new protocol include Belgium, Greece, Germany, the USA, Uruguay, India, Switzerland, Japan, Malaysia, and Brazil. Cited Google statistics reveal that 49 countries deliver more than 5% of their traffic over IPv6, and that there are 24 countries whose IPv6 traffic exceeds 15%. Among Alexa’s top 1000 global websites, 28% are accessible via IPv6 (an increase from 23% in 2017). Among the existing 1543 top-level domains, 98.4% have an IPv6 name server addressed and can be accessed using either IPv4 or IPv6. The report notes that more work is needed to drive IPv6 deployment in many countries and that numerous networks have IPv6 on their backbone, but not provided to their end-users. It also argues that ‘increasingly, IPv4 is an unnecessary cost and a speculative asset’.