Measuring Ipv6 Adoption a Decade Later

Abstract

IPv4 address exhaustion became critical in 2011 when IANA allocated the final free /8 block, accelerating efforts toward the long-anticipated transition to IPv6. Over a decade ago, Czyz et al. (2014) provided the most comprehensive longitudinal assessment of IPv6 adoption to date, defining a taxonomy of metrics across addressing, naming, routing, reachability, usage, and performance, and predicting near parity with IPv4 within five years. This paper revisits their framework with updated data to 2025, combining direct re-examination of metrics where comparable public data are available with complementary evidence from recent measurement studies and longitudinal datasets. This approach enables a consistent, decade-scale reassessment across all dimensions of IPv6 adoption while preserving comparability with the original study. Our results show that IPv6 adoption has continued steadily but at a slower pace than early projections suggested. While IPv6 is now widely deployed, with nearly half of global users being IPv6-capable and core networks being predominantly dual-stack, IPv4 remains dominant in scale and traffic share. These findings indicate that the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition has entered a steady but prolonged phase, shaped less by technical readiness than by economic incentives, legacy inertia, and uneven regional deployment.