IPv6 Day: June 8, 2011

The need for the IP industry to move from IPv4 to IPv6 has been forecasted for some time. The Internet Society is planning an IPv6 Day to increase awareness around this. The Internet Society (ISOC) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1992 to provide leadership in Internet related standards, education and policy. It is dedicated to ensuring the open development, evolution and use of the Internet for the benefit of people throughout the world.

On IPV6 day, June 8, 2011, Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Akamai and Limelight Networks will be among some of the major organizations that will offer their content over IPv6 for a 24-hour “test flight." According to the Internet Society, the goal of the Test Flight 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.

World IPv6 Day is meant to bring existing efforts together. Players from different parts of the industry will work together with a common goal of enabling IPv6 at a large scale with hopefully minimal disruption. By doing this together, ISPs, website operators, OS software companies and equipment vendors will be able to address problems, such as IPv6 trouble in home networks, incomplete IPv6 interconnection between network providers and issues with websites.

On IPv6 Day, the Internet Society will produce a status dashboard of websites that have said they will participate. You can check a website’s IPv6 accessibility on the status dashboard.

If you want to know more about IPv6 day or to sign up to participate go to http://isoc.org/wp/worldipv6day.

Rose Klimovich is a consultant and writer on technology. Formerly she was VP Product Management and Product Marketing for the colocation and interconnection products for Telx, where she led the efforts in creating the Telx strategy and developing and investing in new products and services in areas like colocation, cloud, Ethernet Exchange and Telepresence video.