World IPv6 Day is being observed today, having started June 8 at midnight GMT. It is a global-scale test flight of IPv6 sponsored by the Internet Society.
A number of major web companies and other industry players are enabling IPv6 on their main websites for 24 hours. You can read yesterday’s post in order to learn more about the IPv6 transition.
Today’s goal is to motivate the various parts of the Internet ecosystem – websites, consumer electronics manufacturers, ISPs, other hardware manufacturers, operating system vendors, and web companies – to prepare their services for IPv6 to ensure a successful transition from the current addressing system of IPv4.
Current estimates are that .02 to .05% of users connecting to IPv6-participating websites may experience some delays or connectivity issues during the day, as routing paths can be longer or IPv6 software issues may arise.
There are several tips for testing IPv6 today.
- Visit test-ipv6.com.
- Install the ShowIP Firefox plug-in, which will show if you’re connecting through IPv6.
- Hurricane Electric's free tunnel broker allows users to experiment with IPv6 by tunneling over the existing IPv4 Internet.
We’ll update this post if anything significant happens today with testing.