Successful IPV6 Day

I wrote a recent blog on IPV6 day sponsored by the Internet Society. The Internet Society (ISOC) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1992 to provide leadership in Internet-related standards, education and policy.

According to the Internet Society, “top websites and Internet service providers around the world, including Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Akamai, and Limelight Networks, joined together with more than 1000 other participating websites in World IPv6 Day for a successful global-scale trial of the new Internet Protocol, IPv6. By providing a coordinated 24-hour “test flight," the event helped demonstrate that major websites around the world are well-positioned for the move to a global IPv6-enabled Internet."

The Internet Society produced a dashboard of results. You can check this out here.

So, how did things turn out?

• We saw a lot of content providers participate in IPV6 day. This is a very good step for this part of the industry.
• Although IPV6 traffic was higher during this day, it was still a very small part of the Internet. We did not see many of the larger eyeball networks with their customers participating. Should this be  the target of another IPV6 day?
• We saw the use of transitional tools like 4to6 gateways. Good test for these tools. However, little native IPv6 to IPv6 traffic.
• The vast majority of users were able to access services as usual, but in some cases, users experienced impaired access to participating websites during the trial. Also, on some of the email lists, I saw postings of the problems people were having and some suggestions on how to fix the problems. A positive step forward.
• Because of the positive experience, some website owners said they would keep their IPV6 access up. That is good progress.

So overall, a good day. The question is, do we need another IPV6 day with more of the end-users participating and with more traffic?

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.