The number of IPv6-connected users has doubled since World IPv6 Launch on June 6, 2012. In Russia, the World IPv6 Launch was hosted by Moscow Internet Exchange (MSK-IX) and the Technical Center of Internet (TCI), together with the Coordination Center for TLD RU/РФ. A year after this event, many major network providers and Web companies increasingly offer IPv6 as a standard service. The number of website visitors using IPv6 has doubled in the past year, and if this trend continues, more than half of Internet users around the world will be IPv6-connected in less than 6 years.
The World IPv6 Launch participants underscore the increasing deployment of IPv6 worldwide: Google reports the number of visitors to its sites using IPv6 has more than doubled in the past year. KDDI, a Japanese telecom corporation, has been measuring the traffic, and says that the number of IPv6 users of KDDI has doubled and that IPv6 traffic has increased approximately three times from last year. Akamai reports that it is currently delivering approximately 10 billion requests per day over IPv6, which represents a 250 percent growth rate since June of last year.
IPv4 has approximately four billion IP addresses, and this pool is nearly depleted as of now. IPv6, the next-generation Internet protocol, helps ensure the Internet can continue its current growth rate indefinitely. The first IPv6 day was held in 2011, when hundreds of websites, ISPs and other Internet-related businesses gave IPv6 a massive test for the first time. In a year, more than thousand Internet corporations enabled IPv6 as a standard service during the World IPv6 Launch. Today, the protocol use is skyrocketing, and IPv6 faces a very bright future.
