Internet Society ISOC - World IPv6 Day.jpgNews out of the Internet Society today was that Google, Facebook and Yahoo were joining with ISOC to celebrate “World IPv6 Day” on June 8, 2011. Content delivery networks Akamai and Limelight will also be participating. For 24 hours the websites will make sure their content is available over IPv6:

The goal of the Test Drive 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 addresses run out.

Now, when I first heard of the initiative, I do have to admit that the wording was a bit strange to me… the organizations will “offer their content over IPv6 for a 24-hour “test drive”“. But here’s the thing – Google and Facebook already make their sites available over IPv6! You can get to them today natively over IPv6 at:

The difference appears to be what is quoted in Google’s announcement today:

On World IPv6 Day, we’ll be taking the next big step. Together with major web companies such as Facebook and Yahoo!, we will enable IPv6 on our main websites for 24 hours. This is a crucial phase in the transition, because while IPv6 is widely deployed in many networks, it’s never been used at such a large scale before. We hope that by working together with a common focus, we can help the industry prepare for the new protocol, find and resolve any unexpected issues, and pave the way for global deployment.

i.e. Google will set up “www.google.com” to be IPv6-addressable, versus a separate site. Now, Google indicated back in 2008 that operators could set up this kind of addressing with them… but I guess they are making that more widely available. Facebook’s blog post about World IPv6 Day today doesn’t mentioning doing anything special beyond working with others to test IPv6 on the address I mention above.

Regardless of how exactly what these websites are doing differently on “World IPv6 Day”, I definitely applaud the initiative and look forward to seeing what other companies will be participants on that day.

If you’d like to participate in “World IPv6 Day” and are a network owner or website owner, ISOC explains how to participate. In a nutshell, get your site IPv6-accessible and let ISOC know.

From an Internet user point of view, there won’t be any real impact, but for those of us like myself who are geeky enough to have IPv6 test networks in our homes, well, we will be able to browse around to all these IPv6-enabled websites on that day and try them out natively.

Kudos to ISOC, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Akamai and Limelight for launching this initiative – and I look forward to seeing how it goes on June 8th!

P.S. And yes, I’ll write up a post soon on how I enabled IPv6 on my home network using simply a v6 tunnel and my home wireless router… stay tuned…

Originally from Voxeo Blogs