World IPv6 Day is “important milestone” in solving IPv4 address exhaustion

World IPv6 Day begins tomorrow Wednesday, June 8th, and marks an “important milestone” in the development of a long-term solution to IPv4 address exhaustion and the continued growth of the open internet, according to Google. Starting at midnight UTC on June 8th over four hundred companies and organisations, including Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Facebook and Mozilla, will enable IPv6 on their main websites.

The test flight of IPv6, the latest version of the internet protocol which governs how devices connect to the internet, will last for twenty-four hours. The successful deployment of IPv6 is crucial to the continued success of the open internet as the number IPv4 addresses available for delegation is critically low. IPv6 will overcome this problem as it allows a far greater number of addresses to be assigned – about 340 billion billion billion billion in total!

The vast majority (99.95%) of internet users will not notice any disruption during tomorrow’s test. Connections over IPv6 will either occur or users will experience and seamless and unnoticeable fall back to IPv4. In 0.05% of cases fall back to IPv4 may fail and users will experience slow response times from participating websites.

To test your own connection’s technical compatibility with IPv6 Google have created this test page. Alternatively, check out their help article on IPv6 for more information.