IPv6, the next number addressing protocol for Internet providers and enterprises, has yet to be tested on a large scale--a concern that Google along with Facebook, Yahoo! and other major Internet entities, hopes to lay to rest on June 8, 2011, which Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) has dubbed World IPv6 Day.
The search engine giant and other participants will enable IPv6 on their main websites for 24 hours.
Switching to the newer addressing protocol, which uses a 128-bit address (or 8 colon-delimited blocks of 4 characters each) in its configuration rather than IPv4's 32-bit address, may cause a few glitches in the end user's surfing experience on participating sites.
"Our current measurements suggest that the vast majority (99.95 percent) of users will be unaffected," Lorenzo Colitti, a network engineer at Google, told Silicon Republic. "However, in rare cases, users may experience connectivity problems, often due to misconfigured or misbehaving home network devices."
But don't worry too much about it; Colitti says Google and other major providers will be working with vendors, manufacturers and application developers in the runup to June 8, as well as educating users and providing testing tools, to minimize the impact.
For more:
- Silicon Republic has this article
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