World IPv6 Day to Test the Internet's Readiness to Switch from the Ancient IPv4

The World IPv6 Day is almost here, on June 8th, a number of big and small internet companies will be testing IPv6 connectivity for their websites and services for a full day. All of the companies involved will be enabling parallel IPv6 and, the older but prevalent, IPv4 connections.

In most cases, for properly configured networks and hardware, this should not be a problem. A small number of users will be affected though, which is why these companies are running the test in the first place.

While gathering real-world data from the test is important, the event was put together more so to raise awareness among users, ISPs, hosting companies and so on.

Despite the dire need for a switch, most ISPs and companies in the world are not ready to move to the IPv6 protocol and, unfortunately, most of them are not very eager to change that either.

Currently, the web as we know it relies on the IPv4 protocol. Devices connected to the internet must have an unique identifier (network address) to enable all of the other devices to find and communicate with them.

With the IPv4 protocol specifications there is a limited number of IP addresses available, just over four billion. The number is fairly big, it seemed humongous at the time when IPv4 was created, the early 80s, when there only a few thousand machines were connected to the global internet.

But those addresses have already ran out, the last blocks were distributed to regional internet registries in February. There are still unused IP addresses to be distributed to ISPs, but in some regions they have ran out completely.

Despite this, there is no apparent rush to switch over to IPv6, which offers several orders of magnitude more addresses. There are some stop-gap measures, companies can use NAT (network address translation) to hide a whole batch of servers behind just one IP address/router, but this solution comes with plenty of problems of its own.

The World IPv6 Day, organized by the Internet Society (ISOC) along with Google, Yahoo, Facebook, AKamai and Limelight Networks as its initial partners, hopes to get enough media attention to signal to companies and ISPs that it's time to switch.

Since then, countless other companies have joined in. Apart from the media coverage, the test will also look to see how many people are affected by configuration issues that could make it hard for them to reach websites that offer both IPv4 and IPv6 over the same domain name by default. You can test to see if you will be affected by the issue on this Google provided page.