IPv6 Growth Inflection Point

Now that the percentage of IPv6 users accessing Google's websites has reached 4%, I decided to revisit my prior post projecting IPv6 growth. Assuming that people around the world use google as it sits atop Alexa’s list of top websites, it would seem such a measurement provides data that could be loosely projected to the Internet at large. It took just 140 days for the IPv6 user rate to climb from 2% to 3%, and interestingly only 140 days from 3% to 4%. Is IPv6 growth going linear? Or more likely have just passed an inflection point beyond which growth will accelerate?

Reiterating our view that the historical IPv6 user data is comprised of two segments, the first being the nearly linear component of near zero penetration up through 2011, and the second representing the present growth phase, we plot the measured IPv6 penetration since the end of 2011. Applying both exponential and second order polynomial curve fittings as before in Figure 1, we see that our exponential curve, the solid red line, fits very well with a R² of over 0.99 while our polynomial curve fit, the dashed green line yields a respectable R² of 0.9844.

Figure 1: Curve fittings for most recent Google IPv6 users data

The exponential curve predicts IPv6 penetration at 6.2% by the end of this year, while the polynomial predicts 5.6%. These predictions are both a bit higher than the corresponding points from my prior post at 5.9% and 4.9% respectively. The trend curves are getting steeper though they diverge rapidly after these near term predictor points, with the former model predicting nearly 15% penetration by the end of 2015 and polynomial indicating only about 10%. Incidentally, the linear 140-day percentage point increase model predicts 8.0% by the end of 2015. Stay tuned for my next post on this topic and an update when this particular penetration measure hits 5%.