IPv6 deployment

Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) is the next generation of the that is in various stages of deployment on the Internet. It was designed as a replacement for the IPv4 address system, which had been in use since 1982, and which was exhausted in 2011. The rollout of IPv6 addresses commenced in mid-2000s and is ongoing.

As of December 2016^[update], Google's statistics show IPv6 availability of approximately 12% amongst its users. It is used more on weekends and adoption is uneven across countries and Internet service providers.

In November 2016, 1491 (98.2%) of the 1519 top-level domains (TLDs) in the Internet supported IPv6 to access their domain name servers, and 1485 (97.8%) zones contained IPv6 glue records, and approximately 9.0 million domains (4.6%) had IPv6 address records in their zones. Of all networks in the global BGP routing table, 29.2% had IPv6 protocol support.

By 2011, all major operating systems in use on personal computers and server systems had production-quality IPv6 implementations. Cellular telephone systems present a large deployment field for Internet Protocol devices as mobile telephone service is making the transition from 3G to "next-generation" 4G technologies, in which voice is provisioned as a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service. This mandates the use of IPv6 for such networks. In 2009 U.S. cellular operator Verizon released technical specifications for devices to operate on its "next-generation" networks. The specification mandates IPv6 operation according to the 3GPP Release 8 Specifications (March 2009), and deprecates IPv4 as an optional capability.

In the early 2000s, governments increasingly required support for IPv6 in new equipment. The U.S. government, for example, specified in 2005 that the network backbones of all federal agencies had to be upgraded to IPv6 by June 30, 2008; this was completed before the deadline. The government of the People's Republic of China implemented a five-year plan for deployment of IPv6 called the China Next Generation Internet (see below).

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