The time for testing is over as Facebook, Cisco, Comcast, and others will soon permanently enable next-generation Internet technology with vastly more elbow room. What's it all mean?
What began as a 24-hour test a year ago will become business as usual on Wednesday as a range of big-name Internet companies permanently switch on the next-generation IPv6 networking technology.
And now there's no turning back.
"IPv6 is being enabled and kept on by more than 1,500 Web sites and ISPs in 22 countries," said Arbor Networks, a company that monitors global Internet traffic closely.
Internet Protocol version 6 has one big improvement over the prevailing IPv4 standard it's designed to supplant: room to grow. However, moving to IPv6 isn't simple, which is why many organizations on the Internet have banded together for Wednesday's World IPv6 Launch event overseen by a standards and advocacy group called the Internet Society.
In practice, IPv6 has been gradually arriving on the Net already, and there's a long way to go after the event. But the launch day is a real milestone. Here's a look at some of the issues involved.
Why all the IPvWhatever fuss?
Because the Internet is running out of room.
Today, IPv4 is used to describe the network address to almost all smartphones, PCs, servers, and Internet-enabled refrigerators so that other devices can exchange data. For example, your computer needs to know the IP address of CNET News to read this story, and CNET's server needs to know your computer's IP address to send the Web page information to it.
IPv4, though, offers only 4.3 billion addresses (2 to the 32nd power, or 4,294,967,296, to be precise). That may sound like a lot, but there are ever more devices to connect to the Internet, and many of the IPv4 addresses are inaccessibly squirreled away by organizations that got large tracts of them earlier in the history of the Internet.
The upshot is that the problem called IPv4 address exhaustion is real: the pipeline of new ones is emptying out. That's a problem for businesses that want to set up new Internet services or for carriers wanting to sell another few million smartphones.
IPv6 to the rescue! It offers 340 undecillion addresses (2 to the 128th power, or 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456, to be precise).
There's only one problem: Upgrading the Internet to IPv6 -- and that means the entire Internet -- is expensive, requires a lot of work, and is something most of the computing industry has been putting off until absolutely necessary. There are still procrastinators, but its time now has come.
The Federal Communications Commission shows the relative size of the IPv6 address space enabled by the longer Internet addresses.
(Credit: FCC)
How real is IPv6?
You've been able to create IPv6 networks since 1999, but there's been little point until relatively recently. Many people didn't have computers, home networking equipment, or Internet service providers that could reach IPv6 sites on the Net, and Web sites had little incentive to make their sites available over IPv6.
But that's changing now.
Come Wednesday, somebody with an IPv6 connection will be able to get data from an IPv6 Internet site. The fraction of Internet traffic will be small but then will grow fast. Yahoo properties that will become IPv6-enabled Wednesday includethe main Yahoo.com Web site, My Yahoo, and OMG.
"For the IPv6-enabled sites, I expect to see roughly half a percent," said Jason Fesler, Yahoo's IPv6 evangelist. "In a year, in the realm of 10 to 15 percent."
Through a partnership called Atlas, Arbor Networks scrutinizes anonymous data from 253 Internet service providers, 125 of which carry IPv6 traffic today. Arbor has measured a flow of 10 gigabits per second of IP traffic flowing, said product manager Scott Iekel-Johnson. That's 0.04 percent of the total Internet traffic on Atlas, and 0.09 percent of the traffic on the IPv6-carrying ISPs, he said.
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. "Hurricane Electric's professional services group has seen a more than fivefold increase in people wanting us to provide courses and consulting to help them plan and deploy IPv6 over the last two months," said Owen DeLong, the company's IPv6 evangelist and director of professional services.
And based on its Internet monitoring, Cisco predicts "there will be 8 billion IPv6-capable fixed and mobile devices in 2016, up from 1 billion in 2011," the company said this week. "Globally, 40 percent of all fixed and mobile networked devices will be IPv6-capable in 2016, up from 10 percent in 2011."
Cisco Fellow Mark Townsley said IPv6 support is arriving at the two ends of the network connection, and that will push ISPs and other network companies to add their own support so the IPv6 connection actually can be made
"On the content side, we're seeing 50, 60, or 70 percent of content available over IPv6 available by year end," he said. And though Windows XP doesn't have IPv6 support enabled by default, Townsley said, it'll fade from the scene. "The good news is, while 30 to 40 percent of PCs that don't have IPv6 by default, in the next two years, that's dropping down to fractional numbers -- 1 to 2 percent." Android and iOS devices, along with newer versions of Windows and OS X, already have IPv6 support.
source: cnet.com
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