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IPv6 Adoption Grows to 10 Percent as Internet Protocol Turns 20

It's been around for 20 years, so why is it taking so long for IPv6 adoption to grow?

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By theWHIR

As the IPv6 protocol celebrates its 20th birthday this month, new statistics from Google indicate that IPv6 adoption among its users has surpassed 10 percent.

IPv6 adoption has grown from less than 6 percent around December 2014 to 9.10 percent on Dec. 29, 2015.

Google measures IPv6 deployment by having a fraction of users execute a Javascript program that tests whether the computer can load URLs over IPv6, according to a report by Ars Technica.

Belgium has the highest rate of IPv6 adoption at 44.32 percent, followed by Switzerland at 30.89 percent, while the United States is among the highest at 25.63 percent. Africa has the lowest rates of IPv6 adoption, with Ethiopia and Botswanaamong the African countries with zero percent adoption.

IPv6 adoption continues to be tracked closely as the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) issued the final IPv4 addresses in its free pool in September, meaning that IPv4 has reached depletion.

So if IPv6 has been around for 20 years, why is it taking so long for IPv6 adoption to grow?

Ars Technica writes that “even though all our operating systems and nearly all network equipment supports IPv6 today (and has for many years in most cases), as long as there’s just one device along the way that doesn’t understand the new protocol—or its administrator hasn’t gotten around to enabling it—we have to keep using IPv4. In that light, having ten percent of users communicate with Google over IPv6 isn’t such a bad result.”

Indeed, web hosts have been rolling out IPv6 support for years. In 2014, for example, Irish web host Blacknight launched its IPv6-enabled shared hosting platform.

This first ran at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/ipv6-adoption-grows-to-10-percent-as-internet-protocol-turns-20

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