IPv6 in 2025 – The place Are We?

January 29, 2025

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The primary in a sequence of blogs all through 2025 highlighting the state of IPv6 throughout the business, greatest practices to think about, and the way Cisco helps clients on their journeys with its services and products.

The complicated historical past of IPv6

IPv6: a protocol with an extended and winding historical past, and one that’s positive to evoke a variety of reactions upon point out – from skepticism to curiosity, from dismissal to openness, from indifference to concern, and all the things in between. More often than not, the primary issues I hear are both “It’s by no means going to occur” or “What’s happening with IPv6 anyway?” The primary is sort of straightforward to deal with – it is taking place. The progress might not be uniform world wide nor throughout market segments, however the information is there, and it might come as a shock to many.

The rise of IPv6 site visitors

The proportion of world IPv6 site visitors Google sees throughout all its properties from customers didn’t cross the 1% threshold till 2013. Since then, it has risen dramatically, hitting round 48% on the finish of 2024. Going by nation, the USA is at 53%, whereas France, Germany, and India are at 78%, 76% and 72%, respectively. As of 2022, Akamai noticed 52% of their US site visitors as IPv6 and Fb was seeing over 61% within the US. And but when one digs into the information, you discover that Residential and Cell segments have pushed lots of these numbers, with Enterprise and Public Sector lagging.

Delayed adoption regardless of early promise

Given these outstanding ranges of adoption, it’s pure to marvel why it has taken so lengthy to deploy a protocol that’s 30 years outdated (!). Many individuals have reminiscences of the 1995-2015 time interval the place there was lots of speak and hype round IPv6, however nothing ever appeared to materialize. Community professionals obtained rounds of coaching, it was integrated into examination materials, and we even had earlier authorities mandates, however nothing ever appeared to get deployed.

Across the identical time because the creation of IPv6, the business additionally developed some life extenders for IPv4 – CIDR, VLSM, NAT and RFC 1918 personal tackle area – that turned out to be so efficient they delayed the necessity for IPv6 not simply by a pair years, however by a number of a long time. However as profitable as they have been, they nonetheless couldn’t overcome the truth that 32 bits merely isn’t sufficient area for as we speak’s international Web. We ran out of recent public IPv4 addresses at hand out within the mid 2010’s and are nonetheless feeling the results: Costs have skyrocketed on the secondary markets. ISP’s have needed to more and more deploy Service Grade NAT and shoulder the operational points that accompany it. Enterprises have needed to continuously re-address their networks to squeeze each final bit out of every subnet. Moreover, many have needed to take care of the ache of overlapping personal tackle area, as completely different elements of their community began utilizing the identical tackle blocks independently. This forces increasingly NAT simply to attain inner communication, not to mention exterior connectivity.

The shift in direction of IPv6

The excellent news is we had an answer able to go – it had simply been in hibernation. Nevertheless, it was going to require a workforce effort, an endeavor that has been working effectively in some areas, however that we nonetheless battle with in others. Service Suppliers, each cell and terrestrial, have IPv6-enabled lots of their networks (with some selecting to run a single-stacked IPv6 core), giant content material suppliers have turned on dual-stack to function many potential clients as doable, and main working techniques distributors have ramped up their help. Mix these with developments like Pleased Eyeballs (an algorithm constructed into most endpoints that may try IPv6 first, however shortly fail over to IPv4 with none noticeable delay to the consumer) and you start to see why adoption has considerably elevated.

Nevertheless, extra work is required inside Enterprises. There are a complete set of middleboxes, software program suites, monitoring and administration instruments, id and coverage merchandise, and different operational concerns that current challenges not confronted by cell and residential customers.

Governmental help and IPv6 shifting ahead

Many governments world wide, together with the USA with OMB M-21-07, have seen this and are placing extra emphasis behind closing these gaps [1]. They foresee an IPv6-only future and know that remaining in a dual-stack state indefinitely is the worst state of affairs to be in, although it’s virtually definitely required within the short-term. This future isn’t just about overcoming tackle exhaustion, but in addition presents new and thrilling alternatives round structure and operations that merely weren’t doable in a constrained IPv4 world. Whereas Cisco has printed a bit on this beforehand [2], my colleagues and I are going to make use of the remainder of 2025 to put out a sequence of blogs that may aid you on that journey: how to consider and plan your new (almost infinite) tackle area, the right way to transition from IPv4-only to IPv6-only, concerns for safety and operations, the position of materials and different architectural designs, and what administration and monitoring appears to be like like in an IPv6 world. Keep tuned!