Glossary · Networking
IPv6
The newer addressing scheme with a practically unlimited supply of addresses, adopted unevenly across the world's networks.
IPv6 was designed to end the address shortage for good, and it does: its pool is so large it is effectively infinite, enough to give every device on earth billions of addresses each. Written as eight groups of hexadecimal, an IPv6 address looks nothing like the familiar four-number form.
Adoption is the whole story, and it is wildly uneven. Some carriers run nearly all traffic over IPv6 while others have barely started, and that split falls along national and even per-operator lines. A country can look modern on fibre and still sit near zero on IPv6 because its providers never rolled it out.
For proxies this unevenness is a constraint, not a footnote. An IPv6 proxy only reaches a site that answers over IPv6, and plenty still do not, so IPv6 supply is real but narrower in where it actually works than the raw address count suggests.
How HProxy handles it
IPv6 adoption splits so sharply by carrier that our country pages report it per network rather than as a single national figure, because a national average hides operators sitting at opposite extremes.
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