Today, June 8, over 400 websites will offer their content over Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), the next generation internet protocol (IP) designed as a long-term solution to the address exhaustion of the 30-year-old IPv4.

At midnight UTC on June 8 (Tuesday afternoon in the U.S., Wednesday morning in Asia), all the participants in the World IPv6 day will enable IPv6 on their main websites for 24 hours. Today will be the first global-scale "test flight" of IPv6.

Popular sites participating in the event include top search engines Google (www.google.com); Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com); Microsoft Bing (www.bing.com); and AOL (www.aol.com). Facebook (www.facebook.com) and Google's YouTube (www.youtube.com) are also joining the tests. Government agencies, including the US Department of the Treasury (www.treasury.gov), will also run on IPv6 today. Universities like the University of Munich (www.lmu.de) and Harvard University (www.harvard.edu) are joining. Sony Corporation (www.sony.co.jp; www.sony.net) and other electronic companies are also joining.

"IPv6 is vital because the Internet's original addressing system (IPv4) has run out of free space. Since every device on the Internet relies on a unique address to communicate, we must transition to IPv6 - which provides over 4 billion times more addresses than IPv4. IPv6 will ensure everyone (users, ISPs, governments, and companies) have direct and open access to the Internet," Facebook said.

"Telecom carriers, ISPs, OS makers, hardware manufacturers, Web companies, and governments around the world are depending on IPv6 to continue growth of the Internet. IPv6 is used extensively in many large networks, but has never been enabled at a global scale."
The goal of the World IPv6 day is to motivate organizations across the industry -- Internet service providers, hardware makers, operating system vendors and web companies -- to prepare their services for IPv6 to ensure a successful transition as IPv4 address space runs out.

The address space used by the current version of the Internet protocol, IPv4, is expected to run out in 2011. Without action, we risk increased costs and limited functionality online for Internet users everywhere, the participants said.

The most important feature of IPv6 is a much larger address space than in IPv4. The length of an IPv6 address is 128 bits, compared to 32 bits in IPv4.

According to Akamai, one of the participants in the tests, regional Internet registries are now assigning their last few remaining IPv4 addresses from the final blocks allocated to them in February 2011. "This remaining address space is expected to be completely exhausted in 2012, though some regions of the world will run out earlier. Now more so than ever, the need for organizations to transition to IPv6 has become critical, though the transition will occur gradually over the next several years."

The U.S. General Service Administration has already sent a memo that by Sept. 30, 2012, agencies must update their information technology (IT) networks-public and externally facing servers and services such as web mail, Domain Name Server (DNS), and Internet service provider (ISP) services-to IPv6. The US GSA is participating in today's tests.

Minimal Impact

The Internet Society, a nonprofit organisation spearheading World IPv6 day, says that one of the goals of today's tests is to expose potential issues under controlled conditions and address them as soon as possible. It said that the vast majority of users should be able to access services as usual, but in "rare cases", misconfigured or misbehaving network equipment, particularly in home networks, may impair access to participating websites during the trial. Current estimates are that 0.05% of users may experience such problems, the group said.

Facebook stated that it anticipates that 99.97% of users will not be affected by the tests. The small number of users who may be affected may find that pages are slow to load and we are working to minimize the impact.

Google said virtually all of its services, including Search, Gmail, YouTube and many more, will be available over IPv6 today. "In all likelihood, you won't even notice the test. The vast majority (99.95%) of people will be able to access services without interruption: either they'll connect over IPv6, or their systems will successfully fall back to IPv4," the search giant said yesterday.

"However, as with any next-generation technology, there may be teething pains. We estimate that 0.05% of systems may fail to fall back to IPv4, so some people may find Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Bing and other participating websites slow or unresponsive on World IPv6 day. This is often due to misconfigured or misbehaving home networking equipment, such as home routers, that can make a computer think it has IPv6 connectivity when in fact it's not working."

Xbox says it will also participate but the tests will be limited to Xbox.com, and will not affect Xbox LIVE for Xbox 360. "Microsoft and the Xbox team are taking this transition very seriously, and this test is one of many investments to ensure there is no interruption of service for our users as IPv6 is widely deployed."

"For the first time, players from all parts of the industry will be able to work towards the common goal of enabling IPv6 at a large scale with minimal disruption," The Internet Society stated. "By acting together, ISPs, web site operators, OS manufacturers, and equipment vendors will be able to address problems, such as IPv6 brokenness in home networks and incomplete IPv6 interconnection."