IPv6 Just Crossed 50%, And It Changes Less Than You Think
IPv6 Just Crossed 50%, And It Changes Less Than You Think
It finally happened. On 28 March 2026, Google's connectivity measurements recorded 50.1% of users reaching Google over IPv6, the first time the figure has crossed half. 1
Twenty-seven years after the protocol was specified, the majority of eyeball traffic is now v6-capable. That's worth marking.
It's also worth being precise about what it means for anyone running a server, because the popular reading, that IPv4 is over and you can stop worrying about addresses, is backwards.
The dual-stack trap
Crossing 50% would matter a great deal if it meant half the internet had stopped using IPv4. It doesn't.
Those users are overwhelmingly dual-stack. They have IPv6 and they have IPv4, and they'll happily use either. Meanwhile the other half of the internet is IPv4 only. A public service therefore still needs an IPv4 address to reach that half, which is why crossing 50% "changes almost nothing about who must hold addresses." 1
The threshold that would free you from IPv4 isn't half of users having IPv6. It's close to all of them having it, or near enough that the remainder can be served through a translation layer you're willing to tolerate. We're nowhere near that, and the curve is flattening rather than steepening.
Meanwhile, addresses still cost money
The economics reflect that reality. Roughly 3.9 million unallocated IPv4 addresses remain worldwide out of about 4.3 billion, with every regional registry's free pool exhausted between 2011 and 2019. 2
Transfer prices have settled rather than collapsed. Figures for 2026 put the average around $25 per address, with /24 blocks trading near $30 per IP and larger /16 blocks nearer $20. 3 That's well down from the $50 to $60 peak of 2021 and 2022, but it's still a real cost sitting underneath every hosting price list in the world, including ours.
When you see a VPS advertised at a suspiciously low monthly rate with a dedicated IPv4 address, that address is a meaningful fraction of what you're paying for.
Dual-stack, done properly
Not "migrate". Dual-stack, properly.
Serve AAAA records. If your site is v4 only, half the world's users are reaching you through their ISP's carrier-grade NAT and you're seeing shared addresses in your logs.
Test your v6 path separately. A surprising number of IPv6-enabled services have a firewall rule, a health check or a rate limiter that only ever got written for v4.
Don't make your public services v6 only yet, because you'll lose the other half of the internet. Do make your internal ones v6 only wherever you like. East-west traffic between your own machines is where v6 saves you addresses and NAT complexity today.
IPv6 on every machine we sell
Every AVS ISP VPS, VDS and dedicated server is dual-stack from the moment it boots. Native IPv6 alongside your IPv4 address, not a tunnel and not an optional extra you have to open a ticket for.
For customers running their own routing we go further. We operate AS210464, and every VM comes with a routed /48 of IPv6, with RPKI validation on the routes we accept and a full community set for controlling where your prefixes are seen. That includes per-region and per-peer-type announcement control, prepending, and remote-triggered blackholing. BGP sessions start at €5/mo, and we lease IPv6 space to customers who need something of their own to announce.
You can verify all of this before buying anything. Our looking glass will run a traceroute6 or a BGP route lookup from Tirana, Skopje, Amsterdam or Dublin right now, with no account.
Twenty-seven years in
IPv6 crossing 50% is a real milestone and a good thing. It's also the point at which a protocol has taken twenty-seven years to reach the level where it still can't be used alone.
Plan your addressing for a world that stays dual-stack for the rest of the decade, because that's the world the numbers describe. Run v6 everywhere you can, keep the v4 address you need, and treat anyone selling you an "IPv4 is dead" strategy in 2026 with the scepticism it has earned.
Sources
- Google IPv6 Statistics, Google
- IPv6 Adoption, Internet Society Pulse
- What is IPv4 Run Out?, RIPE NCC
- IPv4 Addressing Options, ARIN
- RFC 8305: Happy Eyeballs Version 2: Better Connectivity Using Concurrency, IETF
- RFC 8200: Internet Protocol, Version 6 (IPv6) Specification, IETF