Timeline milestone
IPv6 Traffic Reaches Parity With IPv4 For the First Time
From How the Internet Was Built: From Four Computers to a Global Network
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Milestone
IPv6 Traffic Reaches Parity With IPv4 For the First Time
On 28 March 2026, Google recorded IPv6 traffic reaching 50.1 percent of its measured global user connections, the first time the newer protocol carried more than half of that traffic since its 1998 standardization. The milestone did not hold; usage settled back into the mid to high 40s in the following months, and adoption remains highly uneven, from over 70 percent in France and India to under 20 percent across much of Africa, Central Asia and Southern Europe.
Following the 2012 launch, IPv6 adoption grew steadily but unevenly for over a decade, with some countries and networks approaching full deployment while others still relied almost entirely on IPv4. On 28 March 2026, Google recorded IPv6 traffic reaching 50.1 percent of its measured global user connections, the first time the newer protocol carried more than half of that traffic since its 1998 standardization. The milestone did not hold; usage settled back into the mid-to-high 40s in the following months, and the gap between leading countries, over 70 percent adoption in France and India, and lagging regions, under 20 percent across much of Africa, Central Asia and Southern Europe, shows that reaching this symbolic threshold once did not mean the transition begun in 2012 was complete.
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