IPv6 Day: Success or "Non-Event"?

By James Lee Phillips

June 9, 2011 8:09 AM EDT

World IPv6 Day, the 24-hour trial of "dual-stacking", or simultaneously running IPv4 and IPv6 network protocols, met with few if any problems. Likely few Internet users even blinked when the clock struck 8am Eastern Daylight Time, and over 400 companies participating in World IPv6 day 'flipped the switch".

"The Internet did not break," said Donn Lee, a senior network engineer at Facebook, to Computerworld near the end of World IPv6 Day. "As we expected, and as we'd hoped for, it was completely a non-event by technical standards...I talked to folks who have call centers and they said they had totally unchanged volume for any normal day. We have not noticed any difference in user tickets or stats that we track on folks using the site."

Facebook's stats are probably more or less representative of the Internet-using public at large; probably about one-half of one percent of users were connected completely via IPv6 on Wednesday, and perhaps 0.03% of users had any trouble getting on to Facebook (estimates Lee).

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While all concerned parties can now breathe a sigh of relief and get to the far more important and mundane task of sorting out the details learned from this day, it is perhaps predictable that a more or less vocal minority is questioning the worth of it all.

"NAT" proponents, for example, believe that the whole thing was more akin to hysteria, or Y2K fear-mongering, than any credible concerns. NAT stands for Network Address Translation, and it basically lets a user connect to the Internet with one specific IP address, and then provides a large number of 'virtual IP addresses' to all of the devices that connect through it. Sure, there are issues ranging from connectivity to security, since NAT loses true 'end-to-end connectivity', but many of these issues are dealt with via 'NAT traversal' methods.

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More cynical 'IPv6 doubters' claim that the entire question of IPv4 address exhaustion is being far overstated as a means to scare customers into costly upgrades, overhauls, or replacements.

James Lee Phillips is a Senior Writer & Research Analyst for IBG.com. With offices in Dallas, Las Vegas, and New York, & London, IBG is quickly becoming the leading expert in Internet Marketing, Local Search, SEO, Website Development and Reputation Management. More information can be found at www.ibg.com.

This article is contributed by IBG.com and does not represent the views or opinions of International Business Times.