IPv6 Adoption and the Future of Internet Addressing: A 2025 IP Address Market Report
According to a detailed analysis by Geoff Huston at APNIC, the state of global IP addressing continues to tell a compelling story about the Internet’s massive growth and its ongoing challenges with IPv4 exhaustion and sluggish IPv6 adoption. The report highlights that in 2025, approximately 3.687 billion IPv4 addresses remained allocated, representing a minor contraction of 0.01%. Meanwhile, IPv6 struggles to reach its full potential despite perceived technical advantages and abundant address space.
The Problem: IPv4 Exhaustion and Market Dynamics
The exhaustion of IPv4 has been a critical issue since IANA depleted its unallocated IPv4 address pool in 2011. By the end of 2025, Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) held just 3.9 million available IPv4 addresses, with APNIC and AFRINIC hosting the majority. Interestingly, the secondary IPv4 market has been active, with 33 million addresses transferred within the RIR system in 2025. However, the average price per address has dropped significantly by 50% to around $22 per address, indicating that supply has started to outpace demand. Conversely, lease markets have seen less steep declines, reflecting different dynamics between ownership and temporary usage.
Companies like Amazon have dominated IPv4 acquisition in recent years, driven by enterprise cloud demands. However, Geoff Huston notes that significantly reduced IPv4 prices, now as low as $9 per address in bulk deals, could signal soft demand—and raise questions about whether further IPv4 investments are long-term strategic moves or short-term shortages buffered by NAT (Network Address Translation).
An Uneven IPv6 Landscape: Is the Transition Stalling?
Despite IPv6 being positioned as the future of the Internet due to its virtually unlimited address space, adoption remains slow. In 2025, the total volume of IPv6 address allocations fell by a staggering 80% compared to 2023. Geoff’s analysis reveals only 34% of allocated IPv6 addresses are actually advertised in the BGP routing table, highlighting underutilization. Countries like India, China, and emerging markets in South America have led IPv6 growth, but the global user adoption rate only improved by 3.7% in 2025—reaching approximately 54% penetration across end-users in China, a single bright spot.
The global disparity in IPv6 success lies not just in allocation but in network infrastructure readiness and deployment incentives. The report points out that while future-focused operators like Reliance Jio and some Chinese ISPs aggressively adopt IPv6 to cut CGNAT costs, traditional enterprise and mobile operators are more conservative, citing ongoing capital expenditure challenges and low perceived short-term ROI.
Market Implications: What Lies Ahead for IPv6 and the Future Internet
The ongoing coexistence of IPv4 and IPv6 presents challenges for seamless Internet growth. Dual-stack networks present operational inefficiencies and increase complexity. Moreover, reliance on carrier-grade NAT comes with scalability limits and added latency challenges. Huston predicts that market pressures—such as escalating CGNAT costs or IPv4 market volatility—may lead to a tipping point where IPv6-only adoption becomes unavoidable. However, this transformative moment seems to be perpetually on the horizon.
Another concern is IPv6 fragmentation. As the market incentivizes piecemeal IPv6 deployments to bridge operational gaps, significant inefficiencies may emerge in how the vast IPv6 space is used. Table data from the report underscores these concerns, pointing to slowing allocations among RIRs, including a 7% transaction drop in 2025 compared to 2024.
The broader shift toward big tech dominance compounds addressing challenges. Increasing centralization—where corporations like Amazon and Google absorb vast IPv4 stockpiles—risks monopolizing the globally unique Internet address pools. A fragmented IPv4 and underutilized IPv6 ecosystem could exacerbate barriers for smaller service providers and emerging startups at a time when more competition is needed to spur innovation.
The Future of Internet Addressing: Expert Calls for Action
Geoff Huston’s analysis paints a concerning picture of stagnation. He calls for streamlined IPv6 deployment policies, with a plea for service providers, governments, and Internet standards bodies to work in unison toward phasing out IPv4 entirely. As IPv6 adoption jogs forward amid price declines on the IPv4 market, broader industry coordination seems critical to avoid protracted dual-stack inefficiencies.
On a positive note, Huston highlights that some market shifts are inevitable. Scarcity-driven pricing advantages for IPv6 could eventually arise—at least in the long term—while emerging technology like IoT and 5G potentially redefines use cases for expansive address spaces. Consumer-focused privacy protection under IPv6 and performance enhancements due to simpler routing could incentivize operators to make the switch inevitable.
In conclusion, the industry continues to grapple with fundamental questions: Are we witnessing the accelerated end of IPv4? Or is IPv6 destined to remain underused indefinitely? Comment below—what do you think about the slow transition to IPv6, and how does your organization plan for the future?
Original Source: APNIC
