The IPv6 protocol is among the list of important things that make up the backbone of the internet, and yet barely anyone talks about it. Designed in 1998 as a replacement for IPv4 and its limited number of addresses, IPv6 was dismissed early on as a headache-inducing, hard-to-implement complication that would hardly ever gain any traction — despite offering 2^128 possible numbers, solving all network number assignments in one fell swoop.
That changed over time by force of necessity, and Google's tracking graph shows that for a brief moment in time on March 28, 50% of worldwide users accessed the service over an IPv6 connection, marking a historic first. APNIC's stats show that the protocol is in use by 43% of the world, with Asia and the Americas inching ever close to those 50%. Cloudflare, meanwhile, shows that 40% of traffic is done in IPv6, an actually impressive figure if you consider it's measuring actual transferred packets rather than just counting addresses.
The tried-and-true IPv4 and its well-known 123.456.789.123 format from 1980 offers ~4.3 billion addresses in theory, and around 3.7 billion in practice. That always sounded like a lot, but nobody could have predicted just how rapid the explosion of the Internet would be. IANA, the entity controlling the North-American IPv4 space, ran out of IPv4 addresses around 2011, while its European equivalent RIPE NCC could spare no more four-octet addresses nearly seven years ago in 2019. Asian, African, and Latin-American IP registries equally ran out during that timeframe.
The IPv4 space was exhausted with the big bang of internet-connected devices, with home computers slurping up addresses, quickly accompanied by internet-connected smartphones. In the latest decade or so, the rise of IoT devices and cloud computing ensured that any crumbs left were quickly taken. Back in 2019, IPv4 addresses were trading for $50 a piece, and have continued a rather scarce commodity, with entire blocks being used as loan collaterals.
Most anyone can easily spin up a cloud-hosted server these days, but exposing them to the internet at large requires assigning them a public address. Amazon turned the scarcity into a business model of its own back starting in 2024, charging $0.005 per hour for each IPv4 assignment. Although seemingly cheeky at first glance, this probably spurred more than a few engineers to add IPv6 connectivity to their services to help break the chicken-and-egg cycle of adoption.
There's hardly any technical reason not to use IPv6 nowadays, though engineers sure love to clutch onto long-dissolved pearls. Early on, IPv6-in-IPv4 tunneling solutions were cumbersome and finicky. The rise of the now commonly-used NAT (Network Address Translation) that allows multiple computers to sit behind a single address, like most any home, likewise led detractors to wave the need for IPv6 away.
Some people still think that the additional 20 bytes or so of an IPv6 packet header translates to significant bandwidth losses, higher CPU usage, and hair loss. The reality is that even 11 years ago, Facebook's tests saw that IPv6 connectivity was around 10-15% faster overall, while networking giant Akamai noticed a 5% speedup in mobile page loading. The speedups are almost assuredly due to the fact that with IPv6, there's very little need to do math with NAT, proxies, and other shenanigans, as in most instances, everything can directly connect to everything else.
Probably the biggest reason, though, is simply the old notion that if something isn't broken, it doesn't need fixing, probably coupled with most businesses only being concerned about the next quarter rather than a problem that's expected to only have a material cost months or years down the road.
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