June 8 2011 - World IPv6 Day Will Test New Internet Protocol

Mark your calendars: Wednesday, June 8, is World IPv6 Day. On that date, the Internet Society will oversee the first global trial for the new Internet protocol.

The society said it will be joined by a variety of web sites and Internet service providers, including Facebook, Google , Yahoo, Akamai and Limelight Networks. In all, more than 225 organizations will use IPv6 on their main services for a full 24 hours to test the technology and motivate other organizations to prepare for the handoff from the current IPv4, which is rapidly running out of addresses.


'An Important Step' Leslie Daigle, chief Internet technology officer for the society, said the test flight is "an important step toward ensuring the global Internet can continue to grow and evolve so that it can connect billions of new users and devices."


The goals of the test drive include exposing potential issues, but doing so under controlled conditions. The society estimates 99.95 percent of users will experience no problems connecting to the web on World IPv6 Day.


Businesses and Internet providers are encouraged to review their plans for the transition. Steps include providers making IPv6 connectivity available to all users, web sites offering their wares over IPv6, software updates for older operating systems, and firmware updates by home gateway manufacturers. An open-source IPv6 test-drive site, created by Jason Fesler, is available at test-ipv6.com, with summary results about the visitor's readiness.


On Feb. 3, the end for IPv4 was announced. In a public ceremony, the last blocks of addresses based on the current Internet Protocol were assigned to regional Internet registries (RIR). Those addresses are projected to be given out by the RIRs by September, at which point the future expansion of the Internet will depend on a successful transition to IPv6.


Each block contains 16 million addresses, and one block went to each of the five regional organizations covering Africa, the Asia Pacific region, America, Europe and the Middle East, and the Latin American and Caribbean region. The handoff was conducted at a public ceremony in Miami by four international nonprofit groups that collaboratively administer the Internet addressing system.


'A Matter of Time' Raúl Echeberría, chairman of the RIR umbrella organization, the Number Resource Organization, said in February that "it's only a matter of time before the RIRs and Internet service providers must start denying requests for IPv4 address space." He added that "deploying IPv6 is now a requirement, not an option."