IPv6 deployment

Deployment of Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6), the next generation of the Internet Protocol, has been in progress since the mid-2000s. Deployment of Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6), the next generation of the Internet Protocol, has been in progress since the mid-2000s. IPv6 was designed as a replacement for IPv4 which has been in use since 1982, and is in the final stages of exhausting its unallocated address space, but still carries most Internet traffic. Google's statistics show IPv6 availability of its users up to 25% depending on the day of the week (more use on weekends), with use over 20% any day of the week since July 2018. Adoption is uneven across countries and Internet service providers. In November 2016, 1,491 (98.2%) of the 1,519 top-level domains (TLDs) in the Internet supported IPv6 to access their domain name servers, and 1,485 (97.8%) zones contained IPv6 glue records, and approximately 9.0 million domains (4.6%) had IPv6 address records in their zones. Of all networks in the global BGP routing table, 29.2% had IPv6 protocol support. By 2011, all major operating systems in use on personal computers and server systems had production-quality IPv6 implementations. Cellular telephone systems present a large deployment field for Internet Protocol devices as mobile telephone service is making the transition from 3G to 'next-generation' 4G technologies, in which voice is provisioned as a voice over IP (VoIP) service. This mandates the use of IPv6 for such networks. In 2009, the US cellular operator Verizon released technical specifications for devices to operate on its 'next-generation' networks. The specification mandates IPv6 operation according to the 3GPP Release 8 Specifications (March 2009), and deprecates IPv4 as an optional capability. Deployment of IPv6 is high in e.g. Germany and the US; and over 50% in a few countries such as Belgium and India. With few exceptions, less than half of web servers are IPv6 enabled. For web users however, use of IPv6 can go up to 72% depending on the day of the week and servers accessed. However, generally less than half of users accessing Google servers use IPv6. That needs not be the case for other servers, e.g. India's use of Akamai servers. Google publishes statistics on IPv6 adoption among Google users. A graph of IPv6 adoption since 2008 and a map of IPv6 deployment by country are available. Akamai publishes by-country and by-network statistics on IPv6 adoption for traffic it sees on its global Content Distribution Network (CDN). This set of data also shows graphs for each country and network over time. A global view into the history of the growing IPv6 routing tables can be obtained with the SixXS Ghost Route Hunter. This tool provided a list of all allocated IPv6 prefixes until 2014 and marks with colors the ones that were actually being announced into the Internet BGP tables. When a prefix was announced, it means that the ISP at least can receive IPv6 packets for their prefix.