Happy Launchiversary, IPv6! Celebrating 4 Years Since World IPv6 Launch Thumbnail
IPv6 6 June 2016

Happy Launchiversary, IPv6! Celebrating 4 Years Since World IPv6 Launch

By Megan KruseFormer Director, Advocacy and Communications
Delu Lusambya
Delu LusambyaGuest Author

Five years ago, the Internet Society helped organized World IPv6 Day, where thousands of ISPs and websites joined together for a successful, global-scale, 24-hour trial of IPv6. A year later, for World IPv6 Launch, major ISPs, home networking equipment manufacturers, and web companies around the world permanently enabled IPv6 for their products and services.

How much progress have we made in the last four years? A LOT! You can read more about the details either on the World IPv6 Launch blog or on the Deploy360 blog, but here are a few highlights taken from those posts:

  • The percentage of users accessing Google services over IPv6 exceeded 12% earlier this month (it was less than 1% four years ago).
  • The percentage of the Alexa Top 1000 websites that are reachable using IPv6 is now close to 20%.
  • IPv6 deployment in a number of ISPs is reaching nearly 50%
  • In aggregate, these providers are now delivering nearly 40% of their traffic over IPv6 to major content providers.

And if you like visuals, look at this beautiful growth chart from Google!

Strong growth is set to continue the rest of this year and beyond with major IPv6 announcements from British Sky Broadcasting, LinkedIn, Apple, and more. Where are you on your IPv6 journey? Please visit the Deploy360 Start Here page to find resources focused on your role or type of organisation, and if you’re a network operator, why not sign up with the World IPv6 Launch measurements project and we’ll start measuring the IPv6 traffic from your networks too!

Happy Launchiversary!

Disclaimer: Viewpoints expressed in this post are those of the author and may or may not reflect official Internet Society positions.

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