I’m not the least bit surprised that more people and companies haven’t moved to IPv6. Yes, they know that we’re running out of IPv4 Internet addresses. Indeed, some may know that Asia’s already run out of IPv4 addresses. But does that mean that they’re switching over to the IPv6 Internet? According to Akamai’s State of the Internet 2011 1st Quarter, the answer is a big fat no.
It’s not like the Internet has stopped growing. Far from it. Akamai, a major content delivery network (CDN), reports, “In the first quarter of 2011, over 584 million unique IP addresses, from 237 countries/regions, connected to the Akamai network – 5.2% more IP addresses than in the fourth quarter of 2010, and 20% more than in the first quarter of 2009. Although we see more than half a billion unique IP addresses, Akamai believes that we see well over one billion Web users. This is because, in some cases, multiple individuals may be represented by a single IP address (or small number of IP addresses), because they access the Web through a firewall or proxy server. Conversely, individual users can have multiple IP addresses associated with them, due to their use of multiple connected devices.”
And, let me remind you that that estimated billion is just for those who’ve connected through Akamai to make a Mac OS X Lion download or watch a video. We’re closing quickly in on IPv4’s hard limit of 4.3-billion. Indeed, according to ABI Research our smartphones and tablets alone will hit the one billion IPv4 mark in 2011.