World IPv6 Day is fast approaching (June 8th 2011), excerpt from their website;
that will offer their content over IPv6 for a 24-hour “test flight”.
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.
So what does that mean?
It’s likely you are reading this post from the IPv4 internet; IPv4 is a 32-bit address scheme with a maximum number of just 4,294,967,296 (232) addresses. In reality not all of those are available, some (~300 million) are reserved – they’re rapidly running out. IPv6 changes all this by introducing 128-bit addresses, this dramatically increases the number of addresses available to *drumroll* …
340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 (2128)
That’s 340 undecillion and something…
As great as it sounds and despite being around since 90’s, native IPv6 is ridiculously hard to find. Certainly in the UK, Internet Service Providers are woefully slow in adopting it and making it available for their customers. One of the few alternatives is to use tunnelling services like SixXS, they can help by creating a point-to-point link between your PC / Server and an IPv6 PoP. This effectively gives you IPv6 connectivity regardless of the network / ISP you are on.
This website is IPv6 enabled thanks to a tunnel supplied by SixXS, which will have to do until my ISP (RapidSwitch) can offer native connectivity.