IPv6 on .gov.uk, 1 year on
Last year we had a little look at IPv6 on .gov.uk domains.
IP (Internet Protocol) is one of the core protocols of the internet. It’s used for giving addresses to devices on a network and for delivering the right data to the right device. There’s a transition going on right now from IPv4 to IPv6. IPv4 was published in 1981, at a time when less than 10% of (US) households had a computer, so it’s hardly surprising that it doesn’t scale to a world in which the average (US) household has 5 internet-connected devices. IPv6 was designed so that hopefully it’ll be more than 30 years before we need to migrate the next version of the Internet Protocol.
In our blog post last year we found last year that only 0.82% of .gov.uk websites supported IPv6. From last year to this year the number of UK consumers with access to IPv6 has grown from 0.25% to 14.45% (according to Google). But has government IPv6 adoption grown at the same rate as consumer adoption?
Results
Of the 3,528 registered .gov.uk domains, 2,774 were found to have DNS records.
This is a small decrease in the number of domains from last year (29), and a larger decrease in the number of active domains (292).
Only 33 .gov.uk websites support IPv6.
That’s better than last year, but only by 8. Meanwhile the number of people in the UK with access to IPv6 has gone up by closer to 8 million.
33 is 1.19% so we’ve passed the 1% mark at least. Just 98.81% to go!
Conclusions
Last year UK government sites were in a good position of having slightly more IPv6 adoption than user adoption (by percentage).
Now that the major UK ISPs are starting to deploy IPv6 to their users, user adoption has quickly surpassed adoption by .gov.uk websites.
Government sites deploying IPv6 have grown by 32% while in the same period, consumer access to IPv6 has grown by 5780%.