Google: IPv6 carried half of internet traffic for one day • The Register

Google reported that IPv6 carried half of global internet traffic for a single day in March, marking a significant milestone in the long transition from IPv4. According to Google's tracking data, on March 28th, 50.1 percent of the traffic the company detected used IPv6, up from 46.33 percent a year earlier.

This achievement is particularly noteworthy given that other major internet infrastructure providers report lower IPv6 adoption rates. Cloudflare's Radar service indicates IPv6 accounts for 40.1 percent of HTTP requests, while APNIC labs found 43.13 percent of networks it can observe are IPv6-capable. The discrepancy highlights the challenges in measuring global IPv6 adoption across different segments of the internet.

The milestone comes after decades of slow IPv6 adoption despite the protocol's technical advantages. IPv6 was designed with 128-bit addresses, providing 340 undecillion possible addresses - enough to assign a unique identifier to every connected device humanity will likely create until the heat-death of the universe. This vast address space was conceived to solve the limitations of IPv4, which offers only 4.3 billion addresses.

Several factors have historically slowed IPv6 adoption. The protocol didn't introduce many compelling new features that would drive network operators to upgrade. Additionally, network address translation (NAT) allowed organizations to extend the life of their IPv4 resources by enabling multiple devices to share a single public IP address. This workaround reduced the urgency to transition to IPv6.

Geographic disparities in IPv6 adoption reflect the internet's early governance history. Developed nations secured large pools of IPv4 addresses during the internet's formative years, while countries like India and China received insufficient IPv4 resources to serve their populations. This scarcity drove faster IPv6 adoption in Asia and Oceania, where the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre reported that 29 nations passed 50 percent IPv6 adoption in 2025. The American Registry for Internet Numbers reached this threshold a couple of years earlier.

The one-day achievement of 50.1 percent IPv6 traffic demonstrates steady progress toward broader adoption, even if it hasn't yet become the dominant protocol across all internet infrastructure. As the world continues to connect billions of new devices, the transition to IPv6 appears inevitable, though the pace remains gradual compared to early predictions.