No problem for Apple, HP, Xerox, Ford, or companies that took gigantic blocks of IP addresses in the early internet days and are use only a fraction of the IP addresses they reserved all those years ago. But as the original Internet address system reaches its end life, authorities and academics are warning of a need to transition and speed up on that transition. Scotland does have an IPV6 taskforce but it's slightly low profile.

US Technology Review reports engineer Lorenzo Colitti (left) who leads Google move to the new standard, that "The big pool in the sky that gives addresses is going to run out in the next several weeks." Adding "In some sense, we are driving toward a wall. We have to do something, and IPv6 is the only real long-term solution."

The non-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has been calling for a change to IPv6 for years but websites and Internet service providers continue to clinging to the old Internet standard. Colletti attributes that to there being "no obvious advantage or killer application for IPv6."

According to ICANN chief Rod Beckstrom (right) the number of addresses IPv6 allows for amounts to 340 "undecillion" (followed by 36 zeroes); or enough for a trillion people to each be assigned trillions of IP numbers.

In the UK, University of Southampton academics are also warning that deployment of next generation addresses needs to speed up to maintain Internet services.


 Dr Tim Chown warns that the use  of the new IPv6,  still in its infancy will need to grow faster to sustain the massive demand for new Internet services. 



Web browsing, watching streamed video or downloading files, IPv4 has 'run' the Internet since its earliest days.

It uses a 32-bit numeric address (such as 152.78.189.29, that identifies them uniquely on the network) and provides up to 4bn unique addresses for hosts or routers.

Existing users won't notice a difference andiInternet life will go on, but, Dr Chown warns, a market for IPv4 address blocks will form as organisations trade address space.

More use of address sharing and NAT (Network Address Translation), which allows several machines in the home to access the Internet sharing one global IPv4 address, is inevitable.



The first UK native leased line using IPv6 was run as far back as 1997 at the University of Southampton. The data network in Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University runs both IPv4 and IPv6 alongside each other and many of its public-facing services including web, mail and DNS are available via IPv6 as well as IPv4.

The deployment in ECS has helped Dr Chown and colleagues to work with vendors and the standards community in validating the IETF protocols and feeding back operational issues to help refine the standards and improve their implementations.



"As researchers begin to look into innovative new uses of Internet Protocols for networking billions of new types of devices, a new and much larger addressing system for those devices will be vital," says Dr Chown.

"The challenge over recent years was for researchers, developers and vendors to standardise IPv6 and produce products that support its use - and most important, to devise ways for IPv4 and IPv6 to coexist and work together on today's Internet infrastructure, allowing IPv6 to be gradually introduced while IPv4 continues to operate.



But only a handful of UK ISPs offer IPv6 to customers. The biggest UK production deployment is on the academic network JANET and some of the universities it serves. Google and Facebook already offer content via IPv6 in a limited way.

Deployment is growing, but still in its infancy, and needs to grow faster to sustain the massive demand for new Internet services worldwide.

For this reason, The Internet Society (ISOC) is working with major Internet companies including Google, Facebook, Cisco, Akamai and others to test IPv6 on World IPv6 Day, scheduled for 8 June 2011. (Latest news that Microsoft Bing and Juniper Networks join IPv6 day)

Organisations will be encouraged to make their services available over IPv6 on this day, to evaluate how ready they, and the Internet, are for widespread IPv6 use, in a potentially massive test of the Internet infrastructure.

If you'd like to bring your company's website online using IPv6 during the World IPv6 Day you'll need to make it IPv6 accessible using dual stack technology and provide a AAAA record for the site.

IPv4 websites will of course continue to be accessible over IPv4 during the event. Contact us and provide us some information about your plans to participate and we will add your site to the list of participating sites.

Advice for June 8, 2011
This is a 24 hour event June 8, 2011, from 0000 to 2359 UTC. Websites will be operating over IPv6 for 24 hours on this date. On the day of the event we will provide a status dashboard of websites that have said they will participate. You'll be able to check a website's IPv6 accessibility on the status dashboard.

For network operators, the event will happen whether you participate or not.  As an ISP, you should consider how this event may affect your users and organization.

The most important thing for you to do is to advise your customer support organisation. You should have plans in place to explain the event to customers, and to troubleshoot if problems arise.

You should consider customer outreach. You may want to post a version of the IPv6 connectivity test page on your customer-facing servers, with tips for fixing problems encountered.

Once you've done that, you might send notices to customers inviting them to test their service ahead of time. If you provide gateway routers to your customers, you should test their functionality, to make sure user equipment behind them responds appropriately when content is available over dual-stack.

Some ISPs will be developing metrics and tools, to show customer ticket rate, or various kinds of customer experience, and overall IPv6 traffic seen. If you have the ability, you should accelerate your deployment of IPv6: this should improve your customer experience during the event, and provider better data.