At 21 Tbps, Reaching New Levels of IPv6 Traffic
While setting a new record of 140 Tbps of peak traffic delivered on February 11, Akamai reached another new milestone in the process: 21 Tbps of peak IPv6 traffic delivered! The global adoption of IPv6 is important to the future of the internet and Akamai has been committed to helping move IPv6 deployment forward ever since we launched production IPv6 support in 2012.
IPv6 traffic on Akamai has been growing rapidly. We first crossed 5 Tbps of IPv6 traffic in May 2018, delivering 3 Tbps of IPv6 traffic for the World Cup alone in June 2018. We've been regularly seeing IPv6 traffic peaks in excess of 10 Tbps over the course of 2019.
The United States and India continue to be some of the leaders in IPv6 adoption, with more than half of the traffic to those countries using IPv6 for many IPv6+IPv4 ("dual-stacked") sites. This is due to high levels of IPv6 deployment in many mobile and residential broadband networks. Akamai now has working IPv6 deployed to servers in more than 116 countries around the globe.
Akamai has made IPv6+IPv4 dual-stack the default for new configurations for the past few years, and we recently introduced functionality to make it even easier for customers to self-enable IPv6 on existing configurations.
Enabling IPv6 has performance and availability benefits in many situations. We have observed cases in which large-scale events have overwhelmed an ISP's IPv4 Carrier-Grade Network Address Translation (CGNAT) system, but IPv6 has kept working fine. We also routinely see higher throughput for IPv6 traffic than for IPv4 traffic on the same hostname.
Many Akamai customers have not yet enabled IPv6, but as this changes and as global IPv6 adoption continues, we anticipate seeing even more of Akamai's traffic delivered over IPv6.
