Individual allocations of IPv6 increased by 20% in 2016

A recent overview of the status of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses space in 2016 – published by APNICs’ Chief Scientist Geoff Huston – shows that the number of individual allocations of IPv6 address space has risen by some 20% in 2016 (compared to 2015). The countries that received the largest number of IPv6 allocations in 2016 were Brazil, USA, China, Germany, Australia, UK, Netherlands, Russia, India, and Indonesia. Three of these countries – Russia, Italy, and China – have IPV6 deployments that are under 2% of their total Internet users population. Despite the growth, the overview notes that there has been no large, broad scale of deployment of IPv6 visible in the address statistics for 2016. This means that the Internet is highly reliant on Network Address Translation (NAT) mechanisms, which ‘points to some longer term elements of concern for the continued ability of the Internet to support further innovation and diversification in its portfolio of applications and services’.