Latest adoption statistics
According to Google's latest IPv6 adoption statistics, global adoption of IPv6 amongst users of Google's services crossed the 3% level earlier this month. Similarly, Akamai's statistics paint a picture of healthy and consistent growth in IPv6 usage of their services.
While South Africa is leading the pack within Africa, our statistics still lag behind the rest of the world by a significant margin. This is largely due to the fact that all of the most widely used access networks are still controlled by a small number of operators - none of whom have rolled out IPv6 to their end users or have provided IPv6 capable platforms to their wholesale service providers.
Three percent adoption of IPv6 may sound extremely small and that is because it is. When Google first reported crossing the 1% level many people made the same comment. What is important to consider is the growth: roughly 150% year-on-year.
If this same growth level continues then we will see IPv6 cross the 50% level to become the most dominant protocol in 2017. This could also happen even sooner as the IPv4 address space depletion takes hold in Europe this year and spreads to the Americas.
Much of the fanfare and excitement of IPv6 adoption is already over but we have a few more years of hard work ahead before it becomes the norm.
