In July this year I pointed out the growth in IPv6 uptake was accelerating, as seen from the Google IPv6 stats (45% of the entire world’s Internet users visit google.com every day). Who is Using IPv6? Part II discussed the northern hemisphere ‘summer dip’ in IPv6 that seems to occur each year, and wondered how the stats would look in October.

Well, here they are. Between the Australian IPv6 Summits in 2010 and 2011, the percentage of people using IPv6 globally at Google doubled, from about 0.15 to 0.30.

Between the Summits in 2011 and 2012, the percentage tripled, from 0.30 to over 0.90. The uptake is accelerating into an exponential curve.

And below is what happens when you extrapolate that curve. We hit 20% usage globally in four years, 50% in six.

Of course IPv6 uptake will not be as smooth as this, and will finally level off in an S-curve, but there’s reasons to believe it will accelerate further as IPv4 exhaustion takes hold.

According to APNIC measurements, IPv6 usage in the USA has risen from 0.2% in October 2011 to 1.85% in October 2012 – in a single year it’s grown almost ten times greater.