14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook plans to soon start experimenting with permanently offering IPv6 connectivity for most of its outside facing servers by default. In about a month's time, the beta version of the site will support full-time IPv6 connections, the plan being to roll out support for the new protocol globally by World IPv6 Launch day.
Last year, around this time, large internet companies were planning to enable IPv6 connectivity, alongside IPv4 connections, for their sites globally, for one day only, as a test. World IPv6 Day came and went and was labeled a success.
Unfortunately, not that much changed in that time, except for free IPv4 become even rarer. But there are plans for a big move forward on June 6th, dubbed World IPv6 Launch, by which time several big companies will have enabled IPv6 connectivity by default for everyone.
"With the World IPv6 Launch coming on June 6th 2012, Facebook has committed to enabling IPv6 access for our users on most of our HTTP and HTTPS endpoints," Facebook announced.
"Based on the results of last year's IPv6 test on June 8th 2011, we are confident that enabling IPv6 on our platform will be a success. On May 18th, we will be enabling IPv6 on beta.facebook.com ahead of World IPv6 Launch to give our developer community time to discover issues and report bugs back to us," it said.
Several other big companies are preparing to do the same and roll out IPv6 support by June. Google, Microsoft's Bing and Yahoo join Facebook as the major sites to support the move.
Several content delivery networks, Akamai, Limelight are part of the launch as well, as are several large ISPs, Comcast, At&T and so on. Finally, equipment makers, D-Link, CISCO, also support the move. Thousands of websites and companies are already behind World IPv6 Launch.