BBC technology news 7 Nov 12 article, updated 8 Nov 12

6UK is a not-for-profit membership organisation founded with seed funding of £20k from BIS in April 2010 to help the UK and UK organisations secure every competitive advantage available from the rapid adoption of the new protocol.

The UK lags its neighbours, economies of similar size, G20 and EU member states when it comes to uptake of the new Internet protocol, IPv6. This is of growing concern because the RIPE NCC (the Regional Internet Registry for Europe, the Middle East and parts of Central Asia) began to allocate its very last address space of the previous protocol, IPv4, in September this year.

Many factors impact the uptake of IPv6 and clearly free-market incentives are insufficient. Yet at a country level, delayed adoption significantly impacts national competitiveness, innovation and skills deleteriously. It may also hobble UK based companies facility to compete internationally.

From observing global IPv6 adoption patterns in recent times, one factor appears to dominate IPv6 adoption rates, namely government support. Countries with hands-off governments fall behind.

Additional information

The Internet equivalent of a telephone number is known as an Internet Protocol address, or IP address for short. Just as you need someone’s telephone number to call him or her, network technology needs an address when instructed to dispatch a packet of data from one computer to another.

Today, the Internet mostly uses IP version 4 (IPv4) but this has now reached the limits of its capacity. IANA – the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority – issued the last IPv4 address to the Regional Internet Registries in February 2011.

Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the next generation protocol that provides vastly expanded address space, allowing the Internet to grow to many billions of times its current size.

Every organisation must consider the implications of the need to transition to IPv6 and decide what action it needs to take. Fortunately, having been defined towards the end of the 1990s, IPv6 is a well understood and low risk protocol.

Useful resources

An executive briefing and project planning guide are available at: http://www.6uk.org.uk/resources

For general information about 6UK, please visit: http://www.6uk.org.uk

Note: The 6UK website will continue serving until end-December.

For general information from the RIPE NCC: http://www.ipv6actnow.org

RIPE NCC on IPv4 exhaustion: http://www.ripe.net/internet-coordination/ipv4-exhaustion

For analyses at RIPE LABS: https://labs.ripe.net/statistics/?tags=ipv6

For country statistics by Cisco: http://6lab.cisco.com/stats/index.php

Recent article about US government efforts: http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/internet/3400101/how-us-is-winning-race-next-gen-internet (IPv6 is a requirement for network enabled products and services purchased by the US government.)

The IPv6 Forum:http://www.ipv6forum.com

The IPv6 Observatory: http://www.ipv6observatory.eu

Contact details

Philip Sheldrake – 07715 488 759

Nigel Titley – 07956 619 345

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Here’s a Google Hangout recorded live yesterday, featuring Vint Cerf, one of the ‘fathers’ of the Internet, talking about the new Internet Protocol, how we got to where we are today, and what the future holds.

Many companies supported the World IPv6 Day in June 2011, temporarily making their services available over IPv6 as well as business as normal over IPv4. The day was considered a success, or in the Register’s inimitable expression “World IPv6 Day fails to kill the internet“!

This year, the day is 6th June 2012, and the plan this time is for many participating companies to leave the IPv6 service enabled. It’s IPv6 Launch Day.

Business as normal from 6th June 2012 is to run IPv4 and IPv6 together. In the jargon of network engineers, business as normal is dual stacked.

Organised by the Internet Society, leading advocates of world IPv6 launch day include Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, Cisco and AT&T. Things seem a little quieter on the UK front beyond the 6UK membership, but do let us know if your organisation intends to enable IPv6 in June, or indeed any time soon.

Computing.co.uk reports a supportive statement from Leslie Daigle, the Internet Society’s Chief Internet Technology Officer:

“The fact that leading companies across several industries are making significant commitments to participate in World IPv6 Launch is yet another indication that IPv6 is no longer a lab experiment; it’s here and is an important next step in the internet’s evolution. And, as there are more IPv6 services, it becomes increasingly important for companies to accelerate their own deployment plans.”

You can take a look at the NRO statement here, and a couple of great articles on the topic are this one here at ZDNet and here on the BBC.

If this is all new to you and/or to your colleagues and you need clear information to help you communicate what’s going on and how you might go about addressing the issue – oh dear, no pun intended there either – then our resources page should be your next stop.

Last but not least, if you would like your organisation to be seen as an Internet leader, you can find details on how to join 6UK here.

Facebook, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO), websites with more than one billion combined visits each day, are joining major content delivery networks Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM) and Limelight Networks (NASDAQ: LLNW), and the Internet Society, for the first global-scale trial of the new Internet Protocol, IPv6. On June 8, 2011, dubbed “World IPv6 Day,” participants will enable IPv6 on their main services for 24 hours. With IPv4 addresses running out this year, the industry must act quickly to accelerate full IPv6 adoption or risk increased costs and limited functionality online for Internet users everywhere. The companies are coming together to help motivate organizations across the industry—Internet service providers, hardware manufacturers, operating system vendors and other web companies—to prepare their services for the transition.

The Internet Society is supporting World IPv6 Day as part of its efforts to accelerate IPv6 deployment. “2011 is a pivotal year in IPv6 deployment, and World IPv6 Day will prove to be an important milestone,” commented Leslie Daigle, the Internet Society’s Chief Internet Technology officer. “By providing an opportunity for the Internet industry to collaborate to test IPv6 readiness we expect to lay the groundwork for large-scale IPv6 adoption and help make IPv6 ready for prime time. The greater the scope of the trial, the more effective it will be for all participants so we wholeheartedly welcome additional participants.”

IPv6, the successor to the protocol currently used on the Internet, was designed in the late 1990s but has not seen deployment on a global scale. With IPv4 address space running out, the industry cannot afford to wait much longer.

Vint Cerf, Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist and co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocol stack, commented:

In the short history of the Internet, the transition to IPv6 is one of the most important steps we will take together to protect the Internet as we know it. It’s as if the Internet was originally designed with a limited number of telephone numbers, and we’re soon going to run out. » Google has offered a separate IPv6-only version of search on ipv6.google.com since early 2008, and during World IPv6 Day the company will enable IPv6 for its main websites, including www.google.com and www.youtube.com.

Given the diversity of technology that powers the Internet, the global nature of the trial is crucial to identify unforeseen problems. “Participating in World IPv6 Day will allow us to obtain real-life data that we can use to ensure a seamless user experience as we transition to IPv6,” said Adam Bechtel, Vice President for Yahoo’s Infrastructure Group. “We welcome this opportunity to collaborate with the technical community and provide leadership in addressing the scaling challenges facing the Internet.”

World IPv6 Day marks a key milestone in enabling more and more computers and smart phones to come online. As more of the world moves online, IPv6 will be critical for the Internet to reach its full potential as a catalyst for growth, innovation and economic prosperity. IPv6 provides over four billion times more addresses than IPv4, which will help connect the billions of people not connected today.

Facebook views the rollout of IPv6 as a critically important step to keep the world connected. “As an industry, we’re working together to ensure future generations continue to have open and direct access to the Internet as we do today, » said Jonathan Heiliger, Vice President of Technical Operations at Facebook. « The number of web-connected devices is exploding, and World IPv6 Day is a crucial step in ensuring they can all communicate. »

Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), a leading provider of cloud optimization services, will enable customers to participate in World IPv6 Day. « IPv6 adoption is still in its infancy, » said Harald Prokop, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Akamai. « We stand ready to support customers through this important trial, and believe that early planning and testing will ensure a smooth transition to IPv6. » To support the transition to IPv6, Akamai customers will be able to seamlessly make their existing websites available via IPv6 without requiring disruptive changes to their origin networking infrastructure.

Tom Coffeen, Director of Global Network Architecture for Limelight Networks, said, « As part of our ongoing commitment to IPv6, Limelight Networks today is actively delivering customer content over the world’s first fully IPv6-compliant content delivery service. We are pleased to participate in World IPv6 Day to encourage the adoption of IPv6 across the Internet and to transform address resource challenges into innovation and competitive advantage for our customers. »

One of the goals of World IPv6 Day is to expose potential issues under controlled conditions and address them as soon as possible. The vast majority of users should be able to access services as usual, but in rare cases, misconfigured or misbehaving network equipment, particularly in home networks, may impair access to participating websites during the trial. Current estimates are that 0.05% of users may experience such problems, but participating organizations will be working together with operating system manufacturers, home router vendors and ISPs to minimize the number of users affected. Participants will also be working together to provide tools to detect problems and offer suggested fixes in advance of the trial.

For more information about World IPv6 Day, how to get involved, and links to useful information for users, visit www.internetsociety.org/worldipv6day.

About the need for IPv6

IPv4 has approximately four billion IP addresses (the sequence of numbers assigned to each Internet-connected device). The explosion in the number of people, devices and web services on the Internet means that IPv4 is running out of space. IPv6, the next-generation Internet protocol, which provides over four billion times more space, will connect the billions of people not connected today and will help ensure the Internet can continue its current growth rate.

About the Internet Society

The Internet Society is a non-profit organisation founded in 1992 to provide leadership in Internet-related standards, education and policy. It is dedicated to ensuring the open development, evolution and use of the Internet for the benefit of people throughout the world. See www.internetsociety.org.

• Read Ian Grant’s take on the day at Computer Weekly
• Read Matt Warman’s article at the Telegraph, and
• Tim Bradshaw’s viewpoint at the FT (subscription required).

The presentations on the day are available here, and thanks to David Orban for whipping out his iPhone and recording the keynote by Vint:

You will also be doing the IPv6 UK plc cause a favour if you share news of this event with your network, and begin following @6uk on Twitter. And FYI, and unsurprisingly, most commentary on Twitter on this matter has the hashtag #IPv6.

For many other useful links, check out our resources page.

You can find out more here:
http://www.6uk.org.uk/6uk-launch-event

Facebook goes IPv6

Facebook has begun to go IPv6, making its service available at http://www.v6.facebook.com. Of course, if you click this link and get nothing, that will be because you don’t have a v6 Internet connection. The Twittersphere lists the IPv6 address as:

2620:0:1cfe:face:b00c::3

demonstrating a sly sense of humour

This development was announced 10th June 2010 at…

Google IPv6 Implementors Conference

Despite missing an apostrophe in the title, it appears like Google knows where to put its colons. Well established as an IPv6 pioneer, you will find information about the day’s agenda and all the slidestacks at:

https://sites.google.com/site/ipv6implementors/2010/agenda

Amazingly, I find only two items of news returned from a Google News search of the last 24 hours relating to the conference. If this qualifies, it’s now three.