We regularly check the status of IPv6 deployment in the RIPE NCC service region, and in other service regions as well. One way to measure IPv6 deployment is to look at the percentage of networks announcing IPv6 prefixes and follow the developments over time.

The RIPE NCC’s IPv6-ASN graph shows the percentage of networks that announce one or more IPv6 prefixes in the global routing system. Having an IPv6 prefix visible in the global routing system is a required step for a network to actually start exchanging IPv6 traffic with other networks. The interactive graph allows you to specify the countries or service regions you are interested in, which can make for some interesting comparisons.

The graph below shows the percentage of networks announcing IPv6 prefixes in each Regional Internet Registry’s (RIR) service region over the last few years.

It is interesting to see that the percentage of networks announcing IPv6 address space in the APNIC and the RIPE NCC service regions continues to increase steadily. Both of these RIRs have reached IPv4 exhaustion (in 2011 and 2012 respectively) and are currently allocating from their last /8 block of addresses.

It is also encouraging to see that the percentage of IPv6-enabled networks in the ARIN service region, which is projected to be the third RIR to reach its last /8 of IPv4 addresses, is also increasing. On the other hand, the percentage of IPv6-enabled networks in the Lacnic and the AFRINIC service regions appears to have stopped growing. For the Lacnic service region this number even fell a little over the last few months. Despite the absolute number of IPv6 announcing networks growing from 388 to 399 since the beginning of 2013, this growth was outpaced by the total growth of networks in the service region that are visible in the global routing system, which resulted in a total percentage decrease from 15.5% to 15.0% for this period. Even though this might not be a surprise, it’s reassuring to see that in regions where IPv4 exhaustion has occurred, there is a steady growth in the percentage of networks announcing IPv6 address space.

If you find other interesting comparisons between countries or regions, please comment below! You can find more information and statistics on RIPE Labs.

Note that this article is based on work done by Emile Aben, System Architect at the RIPE NCC.