How much is IPv6 used?
You're already running IPv6
Think you don't have IPv6? You do. Every computer, phone and tablet gives itself a link-local address, an address that starts with fe80:: and is only valid on the local network. It's there even when your provider doesn't deliver a single IPv6 address.
And it gets used. Printers, Chromecasts and Apple TVs find each other and talk to each other over IPv6 using link-local addresses, and the same goes for plenty of other things in an ordinary home or office. New smart home devices built on Matter and Thread rely entirely on IPv6.
See for yourself. The commands that show the neighbours on the local network are in Why IPv6?, and the list is rarely empty.
So what's missing isn't IPv6 on the network. It's IPv6 out to the internet – and how that's going is measured by several organisations, each in its own way.
Statistics on IPv6 on the internet
- Google – the share of users reaching Google over IPv6, over time and by country. The most frequently cited figure.
- Facebook – the share of IPv6 among Facebook's users, by country and by provider.
- Akamai – IPv6 in the traffic to one of the world's largest content delivery networks, by country and by network.
- APNIC – measurements by country and by provider, made using ads in web browsers all over the world. Sweden is here too.
- Cloudflare Radar – the share of IPv6 in traffic passing through Cloudflare, by country.
- Internet Society Pulse – brings together several sources and shows the situation country by country.
- Eric Vyncke – tests the 50 most visited websites under each top-level domain and ranks countries by how many of them have IPv6.
The figures differ because they measure different things: users, traffic, networks or websites. But the curves point in the same direction.
Do the services have IPv6?
The statistics above are about users. The other half is the services: do the website, the name servers and the email have IPv6?
That's something I track myself at kommunermedipv6.se. The site started in 2008 with Sweden's municipalities and today follows more than 100,000 domains in 42 countries.