Practical Technology

World IPv6 Day is here, and with it many ISPs, websites and manufacturers are now supporting IPv6, the next generation network protocol of the internet.

For many users, though, the questions of what, when and why still await answers.

Everyone in networking knows that they should be switching to IPv6. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) realized that in 1994, when it predicted that IPv4’s 4.3 billion addresses wouldn’t be enough. Its answer was IPv6. With its 128-bit address space it can have up to 2^128 addresses — that’s 40,282,366,920 billion billion billion usable addresses. Even an interstellar internet won’t run out of numbers any time soon.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, the regional internet registries (RIRs) in charge of parceling out IP addresses are down to their last old-style IPv4 addresses. Indeed, the Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC) ran out of IPv4 addresses in April 2011. RIPE NCC, Europe’s RIR, will be the next to run out sometime in August. In North America, the last IPv4 address will be assigned in June 2013.

That will be the end of the road for new IPv4 addresses. Technologies like Network Address Translation (NAT) and Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) that let us run multiple devices behind a single IP address have won us some time, but while neither NAT nor CIDR will be going away soon, they can’t delay the IPv4 famine any longer.

IPv6: When do you really need to switch? More >

June 6, 2012, World IPv6 Day, is almost upon us. On that day, many major ISPs and Web sites will add IPv6, the next generation Internet protocol, to their existing network stacks. So: Should you start panicking now or should you wait a bit?

Actually, you don’t need to panic at all. Come the morning of June 6, the sun will still rise in the east, kitty cats will still purr in your lap when you pet them, and the Internet will continue to work just fine after you boot up your computer.

What will have happened on that day is that numerous major ISPs, such as Comcast and Time-Warner Cable, and Web sites, including Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, will offer their services with IPv6 in additional to “classic” IPv4. All these major Internet powers have been working on deploying IPv6 for years, and there’s no reason to believe that a mass roll-out of IPv6 is going to cause any Internet trouble.

3 things to know about IPv6 as World IPv6 Day approaches. More >