Tomorrow is World IPv6 Launch Day

Last year, major internet service providers like Google, Facebook and Yahoo collaborated, for World IPv6 Day, in running their infrastructure on IPv4 and IPv6 in parallel. This year, for World IPv6 Launch Day, the companies plan to switch to this dual stack approach permanently. The motto this year being: "This time it is for real."

In 2011, a problem with the World IPv6 Day experiment was the fact that there were only around 60 networking companies and ISPs involved, as opposed to 2,900 content sites. Involvement from home router vendors was also less pronounced than expected, with only three companies taking part. Hardware vendors were required to comply with the IPv6 Ready logo program which requires costly certification of devices and does not seem to be very representative of the device's actual compliance with the relevant RFCs, as The H's associates at heise Online discovered during testing.

Many content providers have been experimenting with IPv6 for months, therefore it is unlikely that the global IPv6 traffic will significantly increase tomorrow. Several websites, like The H, have been reachable via a dual stack architecture over IPv6 since last year while The H's associates at heise Online have been on IPv6 for years. Other services, like Facebook and World of Warcraft, have deployed their IPv6 infrastructure early. For people interested in statistics on how widespread IPv6 traffic currently is, Google and content delivery network Akamai have both set up pages that provide statistics for their respective networks.

(fab)