FRESH

Hacker News

Home

Google Hits 50% IPv6

364 points by barqawiz

by JdeBP

8 subcomments

Just to add to the 'but the ISPs do not' anecdotes, it has been six months since someone last commented so it is probably time to mention this again on Hacker News:
* https://havevirginmediaenabledipv6yet.co.uk/
A major ISP in the U.K., that said in a public statement on World IPv6 Day in 2011 that
> As well as our core and access networks being capable of supporting IPv6, we're rigorously testing our entire network to ensure that all customers have a smooth and simple transition when the time comes to flick the switch and turn IPv6 on. We're really pleased with how our tests are advancing and are happy to say that by the end of 2012, we'll be able to fully support customers looking to switch to IPv6.
has not managed to actually flick that switch in 15 years.
* https://ispreview.co.uk/story/2011/06/08/uk-isp-fluidata-hai...

by MYEUHD

1 subcomments

Thread from two months ago (626 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777894

by axus

1 subcomments

When I set up a "pure" (not really) IPv6 server, was surprised that Github does not support it. Without the voluntary operations listed at https://nat64.xyz/ , they'd be unreachable from IPv6.

by whatever1

1 subcomments

I would love to stop paying AWS for public ipv4 addresses.
But simply it is impossible to go full ipv6, as many of isps of the clients do not support it.
Currently there is no pressure to the isps to move to ipv6. In fact the incentives are OPPOSITE! They love charging for static IPs.

by ThePhysicist

3 subcomments

Noooo, my /22 IPv4 subnet allocation is my personal 401k, I need this money to retire.

by spockz

8 subcomments

Meanwhile T-Mobile/Odido in the Netherlands is still not supporting IPv6 despite promising to have been working on it for years.
Ubiquity gateways also seem to not support it sadly. It would be awesome if they supported something like Hurricane Electric’s tunneling.

by throw0101a

2 subcomments

Specifically on weekends, which seems to indicate that it's the corporate/business network side of things that is not bothering with implementing it.

by anonymouscaller

0 subcomment

https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
I've never seen this chart before, was taking a peek from the link in the article. Does anyone with networking knowledge know why IPv6 usage peaks on Saturdays and dips during the middle of the week? (something related to mobile ISPs?)

by coldstartops

4 subcomments

Google hits 50% IPv6, very good for accessing websites.
But my TP-Link router blocks by default inbound IPv6 connections, without any option to configure it, still bad for pure IPv6 bidirectional streaming, gaming or services on home networks.

by CrLf

2 subcomments

Cloudflare sees over 40%, and it hasn't gone up in the last year even with the overall traffic increase. Personally, as the APNIC article also says about their own observations, I guess the overall adoption is somewhere in between.
https://radar.cloudflare.com/adoption-and-usage#ipv4-vs-ipv6
But we have to remember that this reflects the adoption on the client side. With many high profile services still IPv4-only, the fraction of IPv6 flowing on the public Internet might be much lower.
I wonder what incentives are needed to push this forward, because it's not the same incentives as years ago for sure. We've long since exhausted new IPv4 allocations.

by Jerry2

0 subcomment

FTA:
>Individual economies such as India, Viet Nam, and Saudi Arabia exhibit adoption curves that differ markedly from the global average. As the APNIC Labs data shows, this global trend does not necessarily reflect the experience of individual economies.
>APNIC’s own measurement records a 42% worldwide IPv6 capability (Figure 2). That’s a substantial difference, which also needs clarifying."
The nuance is that IPv6 is growing faster in developing countries with poorer economies. I'm guessing this is because building modern IPv6 network from scratch is cheaper & more efficient than acquiring scarce and expensive IPv4 addresses. This is a major advantage for newer providers in growing economies.
So while the Google is showing it at 50%, APNIC's weighted global measurement shows it at 42%.

by mmwelt

3 subcomments

Interesting to see the per-country rates[1]. France is up to 85%, apparently!
[1] https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...

by BadBadJellyBean

4 subcomments

I wonder if there will ever come a day when IPv6 will provide a better web experience than IPv4.
At the moment pretty much every website is reachable via IPv4 but a lot not via IPv6. Will there be a day when this turns around?

by adithyassekhar

0 subcomment

Whenever I turn on ipv6 on my router (isp supports it, dual stack) randomly I get half the download speeds, YouTube video freezes, and eventually a captcha screen on google. The moment I disable v6 even only at the client side I get to max out my bandwidth. Tested on google drive, sites on azure and aws and netflix’s fast.com which show’s your ip just to confirm I was connecting over v6.

by birb07

0 subcomment

Globally, it’s 50%, but local French (>85%) businesses could already go IPv6-only and force others to adopt it

by tgma

0 subcomment

Is this a failure? Absolutely. The article tries to brush this off, but there is no denying it. Operating without an IPv4 stack is not going to happen with v6.

by tulio_ribeiro

0 subcomment

Cloudflare shows a 59/41 split: https://radar.cloudflare.com/adoption-and-usage?dateStart=20...
HE shows 41% ASNs support v6: https://ipv6.he.net/

by j16sdiz

0 subcomment

The real question is -- how much of them are bot traffic?
We knew bot traffic is more than half of the internet, right?

by decorner

0 subcomment

When your router ships with IPv6 default on, this makes sense

by jdw64

6 subcomments

I made my homepage (www.makonea.com) support IPv6 too, but the number of people actually using it is much smaller than I expected. Is IPv6 really that widely used? I'm supporting both because I heard it's good to support both, but I'm not sure what the actual benefit is. Sometimes, when behind Cloudflare, I think even if someone connects via IPv6, it ends up coming through as IPv4

by radiator

1 subcomments

All the projects I have ever worked on, the internal networks always were IPv4. Maybe because it is much simpler for humans to have an overview of the internal subnets in that way. Maybe IPv6 uses numbers that are too large for us.

by sherburt3

4 subcomments

Literally all we had to do was add a byte to IPv4 and we'd be done but noooo we need to overengineer the next protocol and make it as painful as possible to adopt.

by Cider9986

2 subcomments

How does IPV6 affect ip blocking. As a VPN user I wish it wasn't used as a metric for sites shaking you down.

by jessinra98

0 subcomment

> Is IPv6 really that widely used? Mobile carriers use it almost exclusively, which is already a huge chunk of the internet, and newer ISPs are switching to it too.

by bilsbie

1 subcomments

It’s weird we’re all still behind NATs. IPv6 was supposed to be trillions of devices all having their own ip.

0 subcomment

by hugodan

1 subcomments

In Portugal one of the biggest ISPs (NOS) still does not have IPv6

by commandersaki

0 subcomment

Still not fit for purpose.

by agnishom

0 subcomment

Finally some good news in 2026

by charcircuit

6 subcomments

In America I've never had a non-mobile ISP offer IPv6. At this point it would be best to recognize the sunk cost and give up on the migration. IPv6 will never reach the 100% needed to turn off IPv4.

by b112

3 subcomments

And 32% is all llm/bots using AWS and other "pay for ipv4 IP" use cases.

by ck2

0 subcomment

is it because some cellphone carriers are now completely ipv6 externally like t-mobile?

by skywhopper

3 subcomments

I’ve yet to live anywhere where the available mainstream ISPs were willing or able to provide IPv6 service. I’d be happy to use it, if I were able.
I also have built cloud infrastructure for multiple SaaS providers with tens of thousands of customers over the past decade. Only one customer I’m aware of has ever even requested IPv6 support. And if customers aren’t asking for it, my employers have never been interested in the full network re-architecture required to truly support it internally.
There are still several basic services you can’t run IPv6-only in AWS, and a handful of AWS service features that don’t support it at all.
As a sysadmin for decades now, I’ve always found IPv6 to be overengineered and in many ways completely ridiculous. But I’d love to be supporting it in everything I do. Only I still can’t, even after 20+ years of being lectured about it; even after complete IPv4 exhaustion has been reached. I don’t think we’re ever going to turn IPv4 off. At best it will be progressively hidden, even from technical users. And folks like me will just have to keep building workarounds to patch the holes where IPv6 still doesn’t work.

by shevy-java

0 subcomment

I want Google gone. This company is causing too many problems.
I am still sometimes using Google Search. First results are now almost always videos on youtube, aka self-promo. These videos are in 99.9% of the search results I use, totally useless and worthless. Even searching on youtube has recently gotten worse. It is also crap now. I know that because I bookmark various videos, and I can not find older videos anymore either. I can eliminate some results I don't care via ublock origin hero-blocking this Google garbage, but I really think we should no longer allow this de-facto monopoly to worsen the global situation any longer. The USA is protecting these gangsters - it is time to have true legislation that gets rid of that mafia bloc that is Google.

by rkcr7

0 subcomment

[dead]

by tsouth2

0 subcomment

[flagged]

by brador

2 subcomments

2026. Literally no reason to be using this outdated limited addressing.
New regex: IP(any collection of numbers and dots).
Now we have infinite IP address possibilities and no one controls the space.
Done.

by xyst

0 subcomment

Took them long enough. Now if only Google would follow with their own services.
Sure Gmail has ipv6 enabled and routable ip6 MX. but sending to those addresses is often rejected and forced to retry over ipv4.
Don’t get me started on gh

by rvba

5 subcomments

Great example of how fixing things "the correct way" does not seem to work sometimes.
They added those new addresses that can store more information.. but this requires a rewrite of old software to make it work.
If they used the old >bolting on top< method by extending ip4 from 4 octets to 8 (or more) octets, then old software could be extended much easier too / probably addresses could be simply mechanically translated too, so ancient software can work.

by PacificSpecific

2 subcomments

First thing I do on a fresh Linux install is set ipv6 to deactivated. Fixes all my initial Linux install problems. I don't question it, it just works every time.

by wolvoleo

6 subcomments

I have it switched off on most networks and servers including my home network. I just don't need it here and I have zero to do with asia.
I wish they had just made an IPv5 though. With e.g. 6 bytes instead of 4. 65535 times the current internet should be plenty. I feel like IPv6 is overengineered and I'm glad it didn't take off yet. I like being able to memorise IP addresses, it really helps testing.
If I ever do switch it on on my home network I'll probably use NAT on the router so I can still keep it exclusively IPv4 internally on the network.
I first learned about IPv6 when I was studying (1993) and I already felt like it was an overengineered monstrosity back then. They were campaigning like it would be the internet next year. Well that aged well, lol. That's now 33 years ago.
I truly think that if they had made it simpler and more IPv4 compatible we would have been moved over in 2-3 years. But no they had to keep supporting this thing. Well, at this point I'm going to avoid playing ball as long as I can.