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Comment by TheDudeMan | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't look stuck to me. https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

That's end user/website visitor adoption rates, but website adoption rates are much different. Since 2016, the share of end users with ipv6 support has quadrupled from 11% to the current 40%. For websites, if you look at the Alexa top 500 from 2016 and compare it with today, you actually see a regression for the "site answers ipv6" column from 95 to 86, while the "www. site answers ipv6" column had a slight increase from 108 to 111.

ISPs are way more eager to move to ipv6, probably due to a higher ip address per customer ratio than companies that offer network services like websites or such.

http://www.delong.com/ipv6_alexa500.html

http://web.archive.org/web/20161019011050/http://www.delong....

Not stuck, but hardly a runaway success. That graph shows adoption at 40% and increasing, roughly linearly, at maybe 5% a year. At this rate, it's going to be 2040-2050 before we are in any realistic position for an IPv4 switchoff.

So: IPv4 space already pushing $50/address, ~$1bn of unused-but-potentially-routable IPv4 space (240/4) just sitting there, and 25 years to go before it becomes worthless. Any guesses what happens next?

Relevant:

“When will >50% of users access Google over IPv6?”

Community Prediction Dec 21, 2024 at https://www.metaculus.com/questions/9558/when-50-of-users-ac...

“When will global IPv4 traffic account for less than 1% of total internet traffic?”

Community Prediction Sep 23, 2042 at https://www.metaculus.com/questions/4449/when-will-global-ip...

That's just the path from the user to the gateway (usually a CDN, rarely the server where a website is hosted). Behind that, pretty much all is IPV4. And there's not reason to change, very few companies exhaust the private address range. But as long as everything behind the first gateway remains ipv4, sysadmins will mostly work with ipv4 and ipv6 will never make a real breakthrough.

I believe even in 10 or 20 years, we'll see ipv6 only on public traffic, anything else (which is much more both in traffic and ips) will remain on ipv4.

Interesting. There seems to be a spike around Christmas every year; I wonder if that's due to more people using phones rather than computers during holidays? Or the mix of Asian vs European/American traffic changes?

There also seems to be some sort of weekday/weekend pattern going on.

Both are explained by workplaces being slower to adopt IPv6.

Thank you thats very interesting!

Why does India have such a large adoption rate? Because the got newer hardware to start with I guess?

Seems like that's mostly mobile users[1], even in the US the mobile carriers are all IPv6, unlike most residential ISPs...

1: https://www.businesstoday.in/technology/story/india-to-have-...

Simply because India has huge amounts of mobile devices, and the Indian ISPs didn't get assigned many IPv4 gold rush days when anyone could get an addresses by asking.

Instead they've aggressively rolled out IPv6 and carrier grade NAT where needed

We had some customers in india that required ipv6 support bc some indian isps are apparently ipv6 only!

The question is why China is so low. They must have close to a billion mobile devices only at any time. Other countries aggressively use ipv6 for those, I'm surprised China doesn't. Or Google just doesn't see the real traffic in China?

only 40% adoption after 25 years, that's stuck to me.

I wouldn't say stuck...

The adoption rate in August 2021 was 35.26%, August this year is 39.71% thats a reasonable 12 month growth of 12.6%.

Between August 2020(33.24%) and August 2021(35.26%) there was a 12 month growth of 6%.

Adoption velocity is increasing year on year and for much of the past 25 years there was little reason to roll out IPv6 with gusto and so telcos didn't bother with the investment. With the exhaustion of cheap IPv4 we should see IPv6 adoption velocity only increase.

If a user has capability for both(I think most?), is IPv6 preferred?

Yes. IPv4 connections are only attempted after a small delay: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Eyeballs

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