IPv6 Act Now

Last year, a number of the worlds largest companies transferred IPv6 for 24 hours as a test run to determine whether it would work as predicted. June the 8th came and went without the Internet breaking, companies imploding, or the sky falling in – much to the relief of the pro-IPv6 camp.

Six months down the track, leading Internet firms have set 6 June as the World IPv6 launch day, with web companies participating in the event pledging to enable IPv6 on their main websites from said date.

The Internet Society, which made the announcement, said the day represented; “a major milestone” in the deployment of the standard with Facebook, Google, Microsoft Bing and Yahoo set to be the inaugural web firms involved.

More from Business Computing World…

For the moment I am going to assume there is more sensationalism than fact in the prediction the world is going to end this year. If the doomsayers turn out to be correct, following the advice in this piece won’t matter because Earth won’t be here.

And yet in one way, at least for the Internet, we should all be seen that R.E.M. song It’s the End of the World As We Know It. Several years ago the IT industry press gave considerable coverage to the fact we were running out of IPv4 Internet addresses. This is the year that happens, fulll stop.

And continuing with that famous song I quote “and I feel fine.”

It appears sensationalism sells. What does it really mean to us running out of Internet addresses? In reality, a whole lot of nothing.

That’s because it’s old news, and we have been planning for a long time. IPv6 is coming to town. I first wrote about it in one of my technical manuals over 10 years ago. In fact, I took that manual and some others and put them online with the help of my buddy Charles, eight years ago.

More from TRCB News…

Leading internet firms have set 6 June as the World IPv6 launch day.

IPv6 is the new net address system that replaces the current protocol IPv4, which is about to run out of spaces to allocate.

Web companies participating in the event have pledged to enable IPv6 on their main websites from that date.

The Internet Society, which made the announcement, said the day represented “a major milestone” in the deployment of the standard.

Facebook, Google, Microsoft Bing and Yahoo are the inaugural web firms involved.

More from BBC News…

If you are using Internet or almost any computer network you will likely using IPv4 packets. IPv4 uses 32-bit source and destination address fields. We are actually running out of addresses but have not fear, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is here with IPv6.

The IPv6 packet (Fig. 1) doesn’t look much like its IPv4 (Fig. 2) cousin, except for the leading version field. The IPv6 address fields are 128-bits. The larger address space is one reason to migrate to IPv6 but there are many more differences that give IPv6 an advantage. For example, the header checksum field has been eliminated because transport reliability has gone up and its overhead was unnecessary.

The movement to IPv6 on a global scale is inevitable. It has been more of an issue of getting the infrastructure in place to make the move to cause the minimal number of problems. It is possible for IPv4 and IPv6 subnets to exchange traffic but there are issues that vary depending upon the network configuration and the type of network traffic.

More from Electronic Design…

2011 was a key year in the deployment of IPv6, the next generation of Internet technology used for addressing. IPv4, the existing address allocation system, ran out of unused IP address blocks in February which saw the final five address blocks being allocated to regional registries. ISPs will now find it difficult to get new IP address blocks and they will be encouraged to roll out IPv6 instead. Some have already started this, and you can read more about the differences, and who supports IPv6 in our IPv6 guide.

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