IPv6 standard: an analysis of uptake in the EU : March 2023

In the Joint Communication "The EU's Cybersecurity Strategy for the Digital Decade" published on 16/12/2020, the European Commission (EC) announced a set of actions to maintain an open, secure, and resilient global Internet. One of these actions focuses on identifying, monitoring and fostering the uptake of key Internet standards, as well as best practices for Domain Name System (DNS), routing, browsing and e-mail security. Following up on this, the Commission is exploring ways to systematically monitor the evolution of IPv6 deployment to identify gaps and barriers for their adoption, and evaluate the need for regulatory measures to promote its uptake. This monitoring comes in the form of periodic measurements every six months starting from Q1 2022; the present report is the third in this series and concerns Q1 2023. The deployment of IPv6 is of paramount importance to ensure the interoperability, scalability, stability, and security of the Internet. In the last years, the number of devices connected to the Internet has dramatically increased, significantly surpassing the number of public IP addresses provided by IPv4. The pool of available public IPv4 addresses is already exhausted. Several techniques have been successfully employed in the last decade to deal with this shortage of IP addresses, including Network Address Translation or Port Address Translation (NAT/PAT) or Carrier Grade NAT (CGN). However, these solutions bring additional costs, create new market barriers and negatively affect the scalability and possibilities offered by the Internet, particularly in light of new emerging paradigms such as the Internet-of-Things (IoT), Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAV), smart grids and smart cities. This report provides a detailed overview of the current level of adoption of the IPv6 protocol across EU Member States (MSs) in Q1 2023 in the context of the overall worldwide landscape. The methodology used in this analysis uses data sources from APNIC, Facebook, Akamai, Q-success, Why no IPv6, as well as our own measurements to synthesize Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for measuring the rate of adoption of IPv6 across two dimensions: - End-user adoption, i.e., end-user hosts capable of using IPv6 to connect to Internet services. - Server-side adoption, i.e., Internet services that can operate over IPv6.