Google traffic monitoring data shows that on March 28,The proportion of global users accessing Google services through IPv6 connections has reached 50% for the first time, marking that this agreement, which was born in 1998, has finally reached a historic milestone after 28 years.APNIC statistics show that the global IPv6 usage rate is 43%, and Cloudflare data shows that IPv6 accounts for 40% of actual transmission traffic. Considering that Cloudflare counts actual transmission of data packets rather than simple counts, this number is even more valuable.
IPv4 has provided approximately 4.3 billion addresses since its launch in 1980 (approximately 3.7 billion are actually available), which has long been stretched in the face of the explosive growth of the Internet.
The IANA North American address pool was exhausted in 2011, followed by the European RIPE NCC in 2019, and Asia, Africa and Latin America also declared exhaustion in the same period.IPv6 theoretically provides 2^128 addresses, solving the address shortage problem.
In the early days, IPv6 was regarded by the industry as a transitional solution due to complex deployment and poor compatibility. Nowadays, technological advancement has significantly lowered the migration threshold, and more and more enterprises regard it as the direction of network infrastructure.
It is worth mentioning that the IETF also recently announced a draft of the IPv8 core protocol, which uses a 64-bit address space and is 100% backward compatible with IPv4. Existing equipment can be accessed without modification.
However, the agreement is still in the draft stage, and IPv6 will still be the main force in the evolution of Internet addresses in the short term.