Organized by the Internet Society, ‘World IPv6 Day’ on 8 June 2011 saw top websites and internet service providers around the world successfully trial the new protocol. This gave participants a chance to investigate known challenges of IPv6 adoption further and for a few new challenges to present themselves. In the year that has followed, network engineers worked hard with companies delivering networking equipment to solve the problems identified in the trial.
Last month, ‘World IPv6 Launch’ day saw major internet service providers (ISPs), home networking equipment manufacturers and web companies around the world come together to permanently enable IPv6 for their products and services. The day changed the internet. Now companies like Google, Facebook and Yahoo have permanent IPv6 addresses for their websites. World IPv6 Day helped solve the ‘which came first: the chicken or the egg?’ problem. Before that day, ISP’s were not delivering IPv6 to homes because there was no IPv6 content, while content networks didn’t enable IPv6 because there was almost nobody on internet to fetch it.
The sixth of June 2012 passed without impact for the vast majority of those on the internet. Mail, web and videos all worked as usual. But for some of us – the lucky ones having native IPv6 access – part of the traffic shifted in the background, from IPv4 to IPv6. Many wouldn’t even have noticed anything had happened as websites looked exactly the same. You may now, even without realizing, be reading this blog using the new protocol.
The following graph shows IPv6 traffic statistics of AMS-IX, one of the world biggest internet exchanges – you may notice that the traffic more than doubled:
ISPs now have no excuse; they have to provide IPv6 connectivity to homes, otherwise they risk creating a two-tier internet.
And how is Leaseweb doing with IPv6? Our network has been IPv6 ready and running dual stacked for several years. Being at the forefront of IPv6 adoption and preparing early allowed us to address any challenges early on and without panic. We have made sure any devices we’ve purchased over the last few years have been IPv6 ready and have had IPv6 addresses enabled for our websites for a long time.
We are always looking to the future, trying to provide sustainable environment for our customers. IPv6 is the future of the internet and we saw no reason to delay adoption. All Leaseweb customers may request IPv6 addresses to their services. The IPv6 addresses are free of charge and you don’t have to use a separate network card; Leaseweb runs IPv6 on the same infrastructure, switches and cables as IPv4, the only difference being the additional protocol used.
It is very easy to be IPv6-enabled with Leaseweb!