No longer is IPv6 "just around the corner". It's here. In the half-year following when I last wrote about our measurements of IPv6 adoption , many of the metrics we were tracking have doubled. This is in large part due to increased adoption of IPv6 by residential broadband networks in the U.S.A. and Germany. As of December 2013, we were serving over 20 billion IPv6 requests per day, double the 10 billion per day delivered just six months prior.

IPv6 Hits per Day on Akamai from June 2012 to December 2013, highlighting the growth since my last post

As of mid-December 2013, over 5% of the requests to dual-stacked sites were delivered over IPv6 to users in each of the U.S.A., Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, Peru, Romania, and Switzerland. If we exclude devices and browsers that don't aggressively support IPv6 , we get a better perspective of IPv6 penetration into networks and see all of these numbers rise to include over 11% of requests.In a series of posts on Network Computing , I expand on the details of IPv6 growth trends we've observed in various geographies as well as in various networks and by operating system IPv6 Adoption: Here at Last - part 1, published February 27, 2014 IPv6: Sweet Spots of Adoption - part 2, published March 3, 2014It is likely that this adoption is likely to grow further over the coming months as networks continue to roll-out IPv6.Akamai's IPv6 network deployment footprint also continues to grow and now spans over a thousand network locations in 72 countries across the globe. Some additional measurements from a few months ago are compiled in our Q3 2013 State of the Internet Report As some of the largest networks in some of the World's largest economies are actively in the process of rolling out IPv6 to their subscriber bases this year, IPv6 is no longer just for universities and research labs. Companies without a plan to make their content available over IPv6 and networks without plans to roll IPv6 out to their end-users may be caught off-guard soon if IPv6 growth continues at its current rate. It is only a matter of time (although perhaps still a few years) before some networks look to deploy IPv6-only connectivity as a cost-saving and simplification measure.Akamai has already helped our customers make thousands of Internet hostnames available dual-stacked over IPv6, and over the course of this year we are exploring ways to make this even easier for our customers. If you're an Akamai customer, and want to learn more about IPv6-enabling your Web sites and applications, please reach out to your account team.Erik Nygren is Chief Architect in Platform Engineering at Akamai.