Friday, 8 June 2012
“World IPv6 Launch Day is a lot larger than people understand. IPv6 is the single largest upgrade in the history of the Internet. It’s not a small decision for the major content providers to turn on IPv6 and leave it on," John Curran, president and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers, told tech site Mashable in an email.
Overseeing the launch of IPv6 is the Internet Society, a standards and advocacy group. At worst, Curran said Internet users visiting sites that do not upgrade to IPv6 will have to go through transition gateways, experiencing slower connections and services.
CNET quoted Arbor Networks, which monitors global Internet traffic, as saying IPv6 is being enabled and kept on by more than 1,500 Web sites and ISPs in 22 countries. IPv6 is the sixth revision to the Internet Protocol and functions similarly to IPv4 - the difference being it uses 128-bit addresses instead of IPv4's 32-bit addresses.
In contrast, IPv6 offers 340 undecillion addresses or 2 to the 128th power. It said Yahoo properties that will become IPv6-enabled Wednesday include the main Yahoo.com Web site, My Yahoo, and OMG.
Arbor Networks, which scrutinizes anonymous data from 253 Internet service providers, 125 of which carry IPv6 traffic today, measured a flow of 10 gigabits per second of IP traffic flowing, said product manager Scott Iekel-Johnson.
That translates to 0.04 percent of the total Internet traffic on Atlas, and 0.09 percent of the traffic on the IPv6-carrying ISPs, he said. But Hurricane Electric, a networking company that's been pushing IPv6 technology and services for more than a decade, is seeing the evidence that the shift to IPv6 is real.
