Has IPv6 finally reached its day of glory?

It’s fair to say that IPv6 has not had the level of take-up expected when the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) ratified it back in 1998. Take-up has been agonizingly slow, not reaching 5 percent of traffic until 2014. However, the use of IPv6 has been slowly climbing since, and according to Google statistics, briefly accounted for 50.1% of the internet traffic Google sees on March 28.

However, technology publication The Register, which spotted the tiny but significant blip in Google’s traffic graphic, quoted two other sources: Cloudflare and APNIC Labs as stating that IPv6 had yet to reach such an exalted level: Cloudflare tracked it at a high of 43 percent, while APNIC registered that 43.13% of network hosts across the world were IPv6 capable.

It has been a long climb to this point. IPv6, with support for around 3.4 x 10³⁸  addresses, was developed due to fears that the 4.3 billion unique addresses available under the previous version of the protocol, IPv4, would be insufficient for a global population now numbering around 8 billion.

While the development of technologies such as Network Address Translation has extended the lifespan of IPv4 by allowing multiple devices to hide behind a single address, there is little doubt that IPv6 has gradually been growing in importance and there is every chance that the 50 percent usage line will be crossed for good at some point in the future.

This article first appeared on Network World.