IPv6 addresses are becoming a lot more common, though not necessarily used

Nov 21, 2011 13:20 GMT  ·  By

IPv6 adoption is slow, there's no debate about that. Still, things are moving forward and there are at least a few companies actually pushing adoption. The biggest impact are the companies that affect a lot of users, like ISPs, in the case of Comcast for example, or registrars like Go Daddy.

Go Daddy is the world's largest registrar and, fortunately for its clients, has deployed an IPv6 dual stack solution for its DNS system.

This means that visitors looking up a domain name to get to a site will be able to do it via an IPv6 connection if their ISP offers it and if their computers and routers are set up properly.

Of course, beyond the DNS, it all depends on what the company hosting the actual website offers, so just because you get to the site via Ipv6, it doesn't mean that you'll be able to access all of its resources the same way.

Still, the fact that Go Daddy has been taking actual steps in deploying IPv6 is visible in a study uncovered by Read Write Web which shows that a large number of IPs reachable via IPv6 are set up via Go Daddy.

What's more, the study also shows that the number of IPv6 addresses compared to overall number of IP addresses used on the web is growing fast.

Whereas only 1.27 percent of IP addresses were IPv6 in 2010, 25.4 percent of them were IPv6 in the 2011 study. And that's in large part thanks to Go Daddy which hosts about 80 percent of them.

That does not mean that there's a sharp increase in IPv6 traffic, just that a lot more sites are reachable via IPv6. But since most users have home connections that solely provide IPv4 support.