Our university has bad problems with ipv4. Every few days you'll notice some websites being unreachable, including github. Although with their uptime recently, you never know who's to blame...
Outdated beliefs probably. When I talk about v6 support in our b2b saas, PM laughs and says nobody uses that shit. Big tech are massive laggards on this funnily enough.
It has barely hit 50% and it's already plateauing. This adoption rate is ridiculous despite basically all network interfaces supporting it. I thought I would see IPv6 take over in my lifetime as the default for platforms to build on but I can see I was wrong. Enterprise and commercial companies are literally going to hold back internet progress around 60 to 75 years because it's in their best interest to ensure users can't host services without them. Maybe even 75 years might be too optimistic? They are literally going to do everything in their power to avoid the transition, either being dragged out kicking and screaming or throwing their hands up and saying they can't support IPv6 because it costs too much.
Try going IPv6-only by disabling IPv4 on your computer as a test and notice that almost nothing works except Google. End users shouldn't need to set up NAT64/6to4 tunneling. It should be ISPs doing that to prepare for the transition.
Also, notice how Android and iOS don't support turning off IPv4.
Nearly all ISPs these days are deploying IPv6 for their mobile networks and core service networks, especially in less developed markets^1. The reason is simple, a cost justification. What doesn't exist is a cost justification for Enterprises to deploy IPv6, and for ISPs to deploy Residential / Corporate Internet IPv6.
IMO with the right market conditions, IPv6 could spread really fast within 6-24 months. For example, most cloud providers are now charging for IPv4 addresses when IPv6 is free. Small changes like that push in the right direction.
I think we'll hit a tipping point soon, just like with Python3 - for years and years it seemed almost stalled, then it became easier to start with python3 than python2 and suddenly everyone migrated.
Apple/iOS is probably one of the biggest individual drivers of IPv6 adoption. They've been requiring that iOS apps work on IPv6-only networks for close to 10 years now
> End users shouldn't need to set up 6to4 tunneling. It should be ISPs doing that to prepare for the transition.
Which is what ISP are doing with 464XLAT deployments. IPv6-mostly networking and IPv4-as-a-service are things that are happening in real world right now.
Is there a reason why adoption has been so abysmally slow? Like surely all the big players have updated their networking equipment by now, and surely every piece of enterprise-grade kit sold in the last 20 years has supported v6.
The only arguments I've ever heard against ipv6 that made any sense are that:
1: it's hard to remember addresses, which is mayyyyybe valid for homelab enthusiast types, but for medium scale and up you ought to have a service that hands out per-machine hostnames, so the v6 address becomes merely an implementation detail that you can more or less ignore unless you're grepping logs. I have this on my home network with a whopping 15 devices, and it's easy.
and 2: with v6 you can't rely on NAT as an ersatz firewall because suddenly your printer that used to be fat dumb and happy listening on 192.168.1.42 is now accidentally globally-routable and North Korean haxors are printing black and white Kim Il Sung propaganda in your home office and using up all your toner. And while this example was clearly in jest there's a nugget of truth that if your IOT devices don't have globally-routable addresses they're a bit harder to attack, even though NAT isn't a substitute for a proper firewall.
But both of these are really only valid for DIY homelab enthusiast types. I honestly have no idea why other people resist ipv6.
In parts of the world with fewer IP addresses they already are. My ISP _only_ offers MAP-E access to the IPv4 internet for anyone not grandfathered into an older plan.
Comcast, one of the largest residential ISPs in the USA, has almost full IPv6 deployment by default. The majority Verizon Wireless is IPv6 by default. Residential customers in the USA have great access if they just enable the stack.
There is nothing about IPv6 that prevents ISPs from filtering ports for all customers. They almost all actively filter at least port 25, 139 and 445 regardless of the actual transport. So I'm not sure "blocking service hosting" is the actual goal here.
The problem seems to be that all of the large and wealthy nations of the world have made the necessary huge investments into IPv6 while many of their smaller neighbors and outlying countries and islands have struggled to get any appreciable deployment.
It should be a UN and IMF priority to get IPv6 networks deployed in the rest of the world so we can finally start thinking about a global cutover.
In many developing countries IPv6 adoption is far and sometimes networks are IPv6-only, because IPv4 is expensive and they have relatively little addresses compared to users...
You can see southeast Asia is pretty green on the map of the post.
> It has barely hit 50% and it's already plateauing.
That makes sense. The majority of IPv6 deployment is mobile.
The next wave of adoption requires ISPs start offering residential IPv6. Once this happens, router manufacturers will innovate around the IPv6 offering as a differentiator, making it easy to deploy by end-users. IPv6 wifi APs will then become ubiqutious and so forth across other services. Has to start with ISPs.
At home, I use an Android 16 Pixel phone, and a Chromebook, and I would suspect (but cannot prove) that 100% of my LAN outages can be blamed on the dual-stacking nature of IPv6 plus IPv4.
Google has some weird way of asserting connectivity, and I suspect that when connectivity on one protocol is lost, it is impossible to maintain or establish connectivity through the other one (IPv6) even if it is available upstream.
I am rather infuriated with the status quo at this point, because it is impossible to disable IPv6 on my devices and it is also impossible for my ISP to disable IPv6 on my LAN or on the CPE router which they own and control.
Due to chronic WiFi issues I was eventually forced to place my ISP router into Bridge mode permanently, and I use a 3rd party Netgear which I own, and does not have the same WiFi issues, and where IPv6 is optional (and often fails, because its implementation is buggy and glitchy for no reason.)
The question is, "what will the graph look like in the next 10 years?"
I get the whole s-curve trend but if I squint at 2017, there is an inflection to slow the s-curve down.
Annoyingly, when setting up service with a fiber company in the last couple months, I explicitly asked about IPv6 connectivity and they said, "yes." Turns out "yes, but not in my region."
It's only a matter of time before laptops get 5G. Macbooks have been rumoured for a while to get cellular modems. [1]
This will probably help adoption. On the one hand it will generate more IPv6 traffic. On the other hand it will expose more developers to IPv6; which will expose them to any lack of support for IPv6 within their own products.
Thats quite surprising thing to me and weirdly obvious.
If you are single, have a phone contract, you would need some extra contract for a landline internet and wifi router because thats what a lot of people just do and now they can just add an esim and pay a little bit more.
Interesting that this sounds/feels a lot more right or useful than it did 5 years ago.
I can't imagine a worse privacy nightmare. Always on backdoored baseband in 5G with a unique permanent IPv6 address assigned to the machine. Okay, maybe it could be worse if each user account is assigned its own unique IPv6 perma-cookie.
Sometimes TCP/IP is a leaky abstraction, and recently ipv6 peeked through in two separate instances:
- In a cafe wifi, I had partial connectivity. For some reason my wifi interface had an ipv6 address but no ipv4 address. As a result, some sites worked just fine but github.com (which is, incredibly, ipv4-only) didn't
- I created a ipv6-only hetzner server (because it's 2026) but ended up giving up and bought a ipv6 address because lack of ipv4 access caused too many headaches. Docker didn't work with default settings (I had to switch to host networking) and package managers fail or just hang when there's no route to the host. All of which is hard to debug and gets in your way
You can solve this issue if you have one server with ipv6/ipv4 you can run NAT with Jool and connect ipv6 only servers to that. Like Android does.
I wish hosting providers would give you a local routed ipv4 on ipv6 servers with a default NAT server. It is not that expensive I move 10Gbps "easily" and they could charge for that traffic.
Setting up my own server (migrating off GCP LB) taught me so much about networking. I was especially surprised that providing IPv6 is such a performance boost for low bandwidth phones since they mostly only operate on IPv6 by now and IPv4 needs some sort of special roundtrip.
while it looks like its slowing down, I am pretty sure it will speed up once IPv4 get even more expensive, sites start to be hosted on IPv6 only and become inaccessible to some users that dont have IPv4. Thats surely going to put pressure on ISPs
Outside of hobbyist niche uses, sites won't start being hosted IPv6-only. The financialization of IPv4 addresses will simply get worse and be even more pay-to-play than it is now. Amazon raises the price of IPv4 and everyone goes along as a cost of doing business.
My prediction is that sites will be half-IPv6 only; backends will be IPv6 and IPv4 traffic will get proxied to IPv6 by CDNs / edge LBs. I think CloudFront for example supports that scenario, avoiding IPv4 costs (in theory).
that may be true, but not being able to access hobbyist sites still feels like "being locked out" of something. My ISP provides /48 IPv6 addresses for free, and I already run a couple sites only on IPv6 - because an IPv4 would cost 20 bucks a month - it's not important enough to me personally to pay that.
Nice. But note that the average is still significantly below 50%. It's also a bit concerning that the growth rate seems to be levelling off. It currently looks like a sigmoid curve with a maximum far below 100%.
I wouldn't be so worried about it. It's really hard for something as big as this to really hit 100%. If we hit 80% or thereabouts, we can at least plausibly argue to backwards ISPs that IPv6 is the default and the standard that everyone should reasonably be offering.
Generally: I'm really surprised that Norway is just at 27%. I think I've been with 3 different residential ISPs the last 15 years, and all of them have done IPv6 perfectly well (two nits: I think one required a trivial opt-in, and my current ISP is just giving me /60 which isn't perfect).
Edit: Oops, sorry to my current ISP for shaming them. Some googling told me that one can get a /56 using DHCPv6-PD. I'll try that!
And still, in the year of our lord 2026, GitHub does not support IPv6.
https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/10539
A non-trivial minority of the time, they don't support IPv4 either!
Our university has bad problems with ipv4. Every few days you'll notice some websites being unreachable, including github. Although with their uptime recently, you never know who's to blame...
They supported IPv6 for a short time, but then stopped their experiment.
An excellent reason to move away from Github, I find.
Just found this little site. https://isgithubipv6.web.app/
Maybe we shouldn't even measure percentage adoption and instead just if github has finally adopted..
Most websites still don't
Do we know any technical reason for this? Or are we left to think this is somehow a political thing?
It could be that they don't want to implement IP bans in IPv6.
Outdated beliefs probably. When I talk about v6 support in our b2b saas, PM laughs and says nobody uses that shit. Big tech are massive laggards on this funnily enough.
Came here to exactly check on this to see if there are any changes on Github side too
It has barely hit 50% and it's already plateauing. This adoption rate is ridiculous despite basically all network interfaces supporting it. I thought I would see IPv6 take over in my lifetime as the default for platforms to build on but I can see I was wrong. Enterprise and commercial companies are literally going to hold back internet progress around 60 to 75 years because it's in their best interest to ensure users can't host services without them. Maybe even 75 years might be too optimistic? They are literally going to do everything in their power to avoid the transition, either being dragged out kicking and screaming or throwing their hands up and saying they can't support IPv6 because it costs too much.
Try going IPv6-only by disabling IPv4 on your computer as a test and notice that almost nothing works except Google. End users shouldn't need to set up NAT64/6to4 tunneling. It should be ISPs doing that to prepare for the transition.
Also, notice how Android and iOS don't support turning off IPv4.
>> It has barely hit 50% and it's already plateauing.
Well, the curve has got to level-out at 100%.
Nearly all ISPs these days are deploying IPv6 for their mobile networks and core service networks, especially in less developed markets^1. The reason is simple, a cost justification. What doesn't exist is a cost justification for Enterprises to deploy IPv6, and for ISPs to deploy Residential / Corporate Internet IPv6.
IMO with the right market conditions, IPv6 could spread really fast within 6-24 months. For example, most cloud providers are now charging for IPv4 addresses when IPv6 is free. Small changes like that push in the right direction.
^1 https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/04/asia_in_brief/
Hetzner makes you pay 1 € per IPv4, while IPv6 is free. I'd gladly get rid of all IPv4's given that I have many servers.
ISPs often fail to do this because there is always someone in the hierarchy who says, "nobody is demanding it."
I think we'll hit a tipping point soon, just like with Python3 - for years and years it seemed almost stalled, then it became easier to start with python3 than python2 and suddenly everyone migrated.
Apple/iOS is probably one of the biggest individual drivers of IPv6 adoption. They've been requiring that iOS apps work on IPv6-only networks for close to 10 years now
If that's the case, how does the Github app work on iOS?
Differential enforcement.
Nat64: https://developer.apple.com/support/ipv6/
> End users shouldn't need to set up 6to4 tunneling. It should be ISPs doing that to prepare for the transition.
Which is what ISP are doing with 464XLAT deployments. IPv6-mostly networking and IPv4-as-a-service are things that are happening in real world right now.
Is there a reason why adoption has been so abysmally slow? Like surely all the big players have updated their networking equipment by now, and surely every piece of enterprise-grade kit sold in the last 20 years has supported v6.
The only arguments I've ever heard against ipv6 that made any sense are that:
1: it's hard to remember addresses, which is mayyyyybe valid for homelab enthusiast types, but for medium scale and up you ought to have a service that hands out per-machine hostnames, so the v6 address becomes merely an implementation detail that you can more or less ignore unless you're grepping logs. I have this on my home network with a whopping 15 devices, and it's easy.
and 2: with v6 you can't rely on NAT as an ersatz firewall because suddenly your printer that used to be fat dumb and happy listening on 192.168.1.42 is now accidentally globally-routable and North Korean haxors are printing black and white Kim Il Sung propaganda in your home office and using up all your toner. And while this example was clearly in jest there's a nugget of truth that if your IOT devices don't have globally-routable addresses they're a bit harder to attack, even though NAT isn't a substitute for a proper firewall.
But both of these are really only valid for DIY homelab enthusiast types. I honestly have no idea why other people resist ipv6.
> Like surely all the big players have updated their networking equipment by now
My home isp can't even do symmetrical gigabit, let alone ipv6...
I don't want IPv6. Why would I? It's like a permanent global cookie. You're uniquely tagged and identifiable on every website you visit.
>it's in their best interest to ensure users can't host services without them.
They'll just keep blocking port 25. IPv6 won't change anything with regards to self hosting.
My OS gives me IPv6 privacy addresses out-the-box which rotate every few hours.
> It should be ISPs doing that to prepare for the transition.
Yeah, I dont get why more ISPs don't offer carrier-grade NAT64 instead of the typical CGNAT
In parts of the world with fewer IP addresses they already are. My ISP _only_ offers MAP-E access to the IPv4 internet for anyone not grandfathered into an older plan.
Comcast, one of the largest residential ISPs in the USA, has almost full IPv6 deployment by default. The majority Verizon Wireless is IPv6 by default. Residential customers in the USA have great access if they just enable the stack.
There is nothing about IPv6 that prevents ISPs from filtering ports for all customers. They almost all actively filter at least port 25, 139 and 445 regardless of the actual transport. So I'm not sure "blocking service hosting" is the actual goal here.
The problem seems to be that all of the large and wealthy nations of the world have made the necessary huge investments into IPv6 while many of their smaller neighbors and outlying countries and islands have struggled to get any appreciable deployment.
It should be a UN and IMF priority to get IPv6 networks deployed in the rest of the world so we can finally start thinking about a global cutover.
In many developing countries IPv6 adoption is far and sometimes networks are IPv6-only, because IPv4 is expensive and they have relatively little addresses compared to users...
You can see southeast Asia is pretty green on the map of the post.
> It has barely hit 50% and it's already plateauing.
That makes sense. The majority of IPv6 deployment is mobile.
The next wave of adoption requires ISPs start offering residential IPv6. Once this happens, router manufacturers will innovate around the IPv6 offering as a differentiator, making it easy to deploy by end-users. IPv6 wifi APs will then become ubiqutious and so forth across other services. Has to start with ISPs.
ISPs in the US and Europe mostly have been offering IPv6 for a while now
At home, I use an Android 16 Pixel phone, and a Chromebook, and I would suspect (but cannot prove) that 100% of my LAN outages can be blamed on the dual-stacking nature of IPv6 plus IPv4.
Chris Siebenmann has written extensively on IPv6: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/?search=ipv6
Google has some weird way of asserting connectivity, and I suspect that when connectivity on one protocol is lost, it is impossible to maintain or establish connectivity through the other one (IPv6) even if it is available upstream.
I am rather infuriated with the status quo at this point, because it is impossible to disable IPv6 on my devices and it is also impossible for my ISP to disable IPv6 on my LAN or on the CPE router which they own and control.
Due to chronic WiFi issues I was eventually forced to place my ISP router into Bridge mode permanently, and I use a 3rd party Netgear which I own, and does not have the same WiFi issues, and where IPv6 is optional (and often fails, because its implementation is buggy and glitchy for no reason.)
The question is, "what will the graph look like in the next 10 years?"
I get the whole s-curve trend but if I squint at 2017, there is an inflection to slow the s-curve down.
Annoyingly, when setting up service with a fiber company in the last couple months, I explicitly asked about IPv6 connectivity and they said, "yes." Turns out "yes, but not in my region."
>I explicitly asked about IPv6 connectivity and they said, "yes."
ABC, Always Be Closing.
It's only a matter of time before laptops get 5G. Macbooks have been rumoured for a while to get cellular modems. [1]
This will probably help adoption. On the one hand it will generate more IPv6 traffic. On the other hand it will expose more developers to IPv6; which will expose them to any lack of support for IPv6 within their own products.
[1]: https://9to5mac.com/2025/08/14/apples-first-mac-with-5g-cell...
Dell, HP and Lenovo have had laptops with cellular modems for maybe 15 years at this point.
Thats quite surprising thing to me and weirdly obvious.
If you are single, have a phone contract, you would need some extra contract for a landline internet and wifi router because thats what a lot of people just do and now they can just add an esim and pay a little bit more.
Interesting that this sounds/feels a lot more right or useful than it did 5 years ago.
I can't imagine a worse privacy nightmare. Always on backdoored baseband in 5G with a unique permanent IPv6 address assigned to the machine. Okay, maybe it could be worse if each user account is assigned its own unique IPv6 perma-cookie.
IPv6 will never make it. Maybe IPv8 [0], which IPv6 should have actually looked like:
> 1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1
[0] https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-thain-ipv8-00.html
It's been amazingly linear since 2014.
amazon.com needs to get with the program. Still IPv4 only.
Finally https://www.metaculus.com/questions/9558/50-of-users-access-... can resolve!
This google metric measures adoption in access networks, but at this point I feel more interesting metric is adoption in services.
One such stat is here:
> adoption ranging from 71% among the top 100 to 32% in the long tail
https://commoncrawl.org/blog/ipv6-adoption-across-the-top-10...
Getting full coverage on AWS (/GCP/Azure) and few other key services (GitHub...) would be significant here imho.
Current submission title:
> IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark
Graph description:
> The graph shows the percentage of users that access Google over IPv6
There are reasons to expect both much more and much less traffic per user on IPv6 compared to IPv4...
Sometimes TCP/IP is a leaky abstraction, and recently ipv6 peeked through in two separate instances:
- In a cafe wifi, I had partial connectivity. For some reason my wifi interface had an ipv6 address but no ipv4 address. As a result, some sites worked just fine but github.com (which is, incredibly, ipv4-only) didn't
- I created a ipv6-only hetzner server (because it's 2026) but ended up giving up and bought a ipv6 address because lack of ipv4 access caused too many headaches. Docker didn't work with default settings (I had to switch to host networking) and package managers fail or just hang when there's no route to the host. All of which is hard to debug and gets in your way
You can solve this issue if you have one server with ipv6/ipv4 you can run NAT with Jool and connect ipv6 only servers to that. Like Android does.
I wish hosting providers would give you a local routed ipv4 on ipv6 servers with a default NAT server. It is not that expensive I move 10Gbps "easily" and they could charge for that traffic.
My next project, IPv6 in my homelab. It will be a challenge but it is time. My ISP gives me a static /48, I should use it.
Setting up my own server (migrating off GCP LB) taught me so much about networking. I was especially surprised that providing IPv6 is such a performance boost for low bandwidth phones since they mostly only operate on IPv6 by now and IPv4 needs some sort of special roundtrip.
while it looks like its slowing down, I am pretty sure it will speed up once IPv4 get even more expensive, sites start to be hosted on IPv6 only and become inaccessible to some users that dont have IPv4. Thats surely going to put pressure on ISPs
Outside of hobbyist niche uses, sites won't start being hosted IPv6-only. The financialization of IPv4 addresses will simply get worse and be even more pay-to-play than it is now. Amazon raises the price of IPv4 and everyone goes along as a cost of doing business.
If you have a big site and want as broad an access as possible I agree.
But I wouldn't be surpised if we start seeing self-hosted minecraft or factorio servers with ipv6 only.
My prediction is that sites will be half-IPv6 only; backends will be IPv6 and IPv4 traffic will get proxied to IPv6 by CDNs / edge LBs. I think CloudFront for example supports that scenario, avoiding IPv4 costs (in theory).
that may be true, but not being able to access hobbyist sites still feels like "being locked out" of something. My ISP provides /48 IPv6 addresses for free, and I already run a couple sites only on IPv6 - because an IPv4 would cost 20 bucks a month - it's not important enough to me personally to pay that.
Maybe "think of the children."
There might be a child behind the NAT, thus IPv6 requirement.
Every company I have ever worked for in the US didn't use IPv6 and actually blocked it at the FW
The US has something like 80% of the world's IPv4 addresses, so they feel a lot less pressure to migrate.
[delayed]
Our freaky network admins rolled it out in our global corpo.
Was fun seeing IPv6 running for a few days without problems.
crossed 50% on Mar 28, 2026, 3 weekends back.
google published the latest data only yesterday, hence the delay.
we did it, boys!
despite the smoothbrain naysayers:
https://circleid.com/posts/20190529_digging_into_ipv6_traffi...
finally, the end of the dark tunnel of NAT is in sight, and the internet will be free once more
But I still have to pay Hetzner separately to rent out an IPv4.
Nice. But note that the average is still significantly below 50%. It's also a bit concerning that the growth rate seems to be levelling off. It currently looks like a sigmoid curve with a maximum far below 100%.
I wouldn't be so worried about it. It's really hard for something as big as this to really hit 100%. If we hit 80% or thereabouts, we can at least plausibly argue to backwards ISPs that IPv6 is the default and the standard that everyone should reasonably be offering.
Generally: I'm really surprised that Norway is just at 27%. I think I've been with 3 different residential ISPs the last 15 years, and all of them have done IPv6 perfectly well (two nits: I think one required a trivial opt-in, and my current ISP is just giving me /60 which isn't perfect).
Edit: Oops, sorry to my current ISP for shaming them. Some googling told me that one can get a /56 using DHCPv6-PD. I'll try that!