This weekend brought the great news that Google’s IPv6 statistics have shown that connections over IPv6 to Google’s web sites hit the 2% threshold for the first time. (You can see for yourself.)

While 2% sounds tiny, as I wrote in a Deploy360 post today, the important fact here is that this represents a doubling of IPv6 traffic to Google over the past year! Certainly looking at Google’s IPv6 traffic graph the trend is definitely going in the right direction!

IPv6 Adoption – Graph shows the percentage of users that access Google over IPv6. Source: Google

I think there’s many factors at work here. Obviously there was the World IPv6 Launch last year that brought together a great number of the network operators and content providers who all enabled IPv6, including many of the largest websites in the world. We’ve also seen very large deployments such as Comcast’s network in the US. I also suspect that the rising deployment of LTE networks in the wireless space is contributing as much of that deployment has involved IPv6 from the start.

In a post to the Internet Technology Matters blog, my colleague Phil Roberts also points out these recent developments:

• Telefonica del Peru in South America roll out IPv6 on a large scale
• Deutsche Telekom in Germany and Swisscom in Switzerland launch their IPv6 deployments
• Time Warner Cable in North America join other major North American network operators with its own IPv6 offering
• Two operators in Singapore, StarHub and M1, start rolling out IPv6 for their end users

All of which is great to see! Phil also mentioned the ongoing World IPv6 Launch measurements activity that continues to track the pace of IPv6 deployment (and invites network operators to participate).

This upward trend is being seen across various IPv6 statistics sites and is definitely good news for those of us working with IPv6. Today Google may only be seeing 2% of traffic over IPv6… but let’s hope that pretty soon that number will double again… and again… and again!