IPv6 in India: Why Your Connection May Have Two IP Addresses

If you check your IP address on a phone using mobile data, you may well see something long and full of colons alongside, or instead of, the familiar four-number IPv4 address. That’s IPv6, and India is one of the countries where it’s most widely deployed.

How widespread it is

According to APNIC Labs measurements cited in the APNIC Blog’s August 2026 overview of India’s internet, IPv6 capability in India was around 79% in early 2026, meaning nearly four in five internet users can reach online services over IPv6. It peaked at 82.11% in January 2024 and was 1.19% in December 2015, and the same article puts the country’s IPv6-enabled user base at well over 600 million people. “Capable” means a user can reach IPv6 services, not that everything they do goes over IPv6.

Much of that growth comes from Reliance Jio, which launched in September 2016 as an all-IP, LTE-only mobile network and deployed IPv6 from the outset. The APNIC article describes the growth as concentrated in the mobile sector.

Why this is happening

IPv4 has about 4.3 billion addresses in total, which ran out long before India’s internet finished growing. IPv6 has vastly more, so every device can have its own address without sharing. Networks that had to grow fast, like mobile operators, had a strong reason to deploy it early. Where IPv4 addresses are scarce, ISPs commonly share them between customers with carrier-grade NAT, which is why some connections can’t do port forwarding. Our guide to CGNAT on Indian ISPs covers that side of it.

Dual-stack: why you may see both

Most connections run both versions side by side (“dual-stack”). Your device uses IPv6 where the site supports it and IPv4 otherwise, and you generally don’t notice which. This is why our What’s My IP tool shows both an IPv4 and an IPv6 address, and why one of them can be missing: if your network doesn’t provide IPv6, that box says so instead of showing a made-up value.

How to check your own connection

1. Open the What’s My IP tool on the network you want to test, whether that’s home broadband, Wi-Fi, or mobile data.
2. Look at the IPv6 line. An address there means your connection can reach IPv6 sites. “Not available” means it can’t on that network.
3. Compare across networks. It’s common for mobile data to have IPv6 while a home connection doesn’t, or the other way round.

For a domain rather than your own connection, our DNS Lookup Tool shows both the A record (IPv4) and the AAAA record (IPv6), so you can see whether a site is reachable over IPv6 at all.

What it means for you

For most people, nothing needs to change: it works in the background. It matters if you host something at home and want people to reach it, since IPv6 avoids the NAT problem, and when you’re troubleshooting something that works on one network but not another. It also explains why the same website can behave differently on your phone and your laptop, when one path uses IPv6 and the other doesn’t.