IPv6 in 2025 – The place Are We?

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

The complicated historical past of IPv6

IPv6: a protocol with an extended and winding historical past, and one that’s certain to evoke a variety of reactions upon point out – from skepticism to curiosity, from dismissal to openness, from indifference to worry, 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 kind of straightforward to handle – it is occurring. The progress is probably not uniform world wide nor throughout market segments, however the knowledge is there, and it could come as a shock to many.

The rise of IPv6 visitors

The share of world IPv6 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 US is at 53%, whereas France, Germany, and India are at 78%, 76% and 72%, respectively. As of 2022, Akamai noticed 52% of their US visitors as IPv6 and Fb was seeing over 61% within the US. And but when one digs into the info, 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 distinguished ranges of adoption, it’s pure to marvel why it has taken so lengthy to deploy a protocol that’s 30 years outdated (!).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 received rounds of coaching, it was included into examination materials, and we even had earlier authorities mandates, however nothing ever appeared to get deployed.

Across the similar time because the creation of IPv6, the business additionally developed some life extenders for IPv4 – CIDR, VLSM, NAT and RFC 1918 personal handle 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 many years. However as profitable as they had been, they nonetheless couldn’t overcome the truth that 32 bits merely isn’t sufficient area for right this moment’s world Web. We ran out of recent public IPv4 addresses at hand out within the mid 2010’s and are nonetheless feeling the implications: 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 handle area, as totally different components of their community began utilizing the identical handle blocks independently. This forces increasingly more NAT simply to realize 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 staff effort, an endeavor that has been working properly in some areas, however that we nonetheless battle with in others. Service Suppliers, each cellular and terrestrial, have IPv6-enabled a lot 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 prospects as potential, and main working methods distributors have ramped up their help. Mix these with developments like Comfortable Eyeballs (an algorithm constructed into most endpoints that can 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 issues that current challenges not confronted by cellular and residential customers.

Governmental help and IPv6 transferring ahead

Many governments world wide, together with the US 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 scenario to be in, although it’s nearly definitely required within the short-term. This future isn’t just about overcoming handle exhaustion, but additionally presents new and thrilling alternatives round structure and operations that merely weren’t potential 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 collection of blogs that can assist you on that journey: how to consider and plan your new (almost infinite) handle area, learn how to transition from IPv4-only to IPv6-only, issues for safety and operations, the position of materials and different architectural designs, and what administration and monitoring seems to be like in an IPv6 world. Keep tuned!