IPv6 in Kuwait: one network carries almost all of it

Every device online needs an address. The original scheme, IPv4, tops out at about 4.3 billion of them, a ceiling the world hit years ago. IPv6 has room for so many that running out is not a practical concern. The catch is that your phone or laptop supporting it is not enough: your provider has to switch it on for your line.

APNIC Labs, the research arm of the Asia-Pacific internet address registry, measures how many users can actually use it. Over the 30 days to 22 October 2026, 26.52% of users in Kuwait were IPv6-capable. The global figure in the same measurement is 43.64%, and Western Asia sits at 26.03%.

It depends almost entirely on your network

APNIC’s per-network table for Kuwait shows how lopsided that average is:

• Ooredoo (National Mobile Telecommunications): 88.32% IPv6-capable.
• Zain (Mobile Telecommunications Company): 0.47%.
• stc (Kuwait Telecommunications Company): 0.44%.
• Fixed-line providers: Fast Telco 1.18%, Gulfnet 0.91%, Qualitynet 0.83%.

In practice, nearly all of Kuwait’s IPv6 traffic comes from one operator.

Does it matter yet?

For everyday browsing, no. Big sites run both systems side by side and your line reaches them over IPv4. A site or service that is IPv6-only, though, simply won’t load on a line without it.

Check your own line

• Open test-ipv6.com on the device, connected to the network you want to check, with any VPN turned off.
• Within seconds it names your provider, says whether it found an IPv6 address, and gives a readiness score out of 10.
• Run it once on home Wi-Fi and once on mobile data. They may be different providers with different answers.

We ran it today on an stc line: “No IPv6 address detected”, and a score of 0/10. The test’s own advice in that case is to ask your provider about native IPv6, because the switch is on their side, not yours.

Photo: an FC fibre-optic connector on a yellow cable, for illustration, by Попов Андрей Владимирович, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: APNIC Labs, “Use of IPv6 for Kuwait” (stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6/KW), and test-ipv6.com, run by APNIC Labs, both checked 23 October 2026.