Everyday seems to be designated a special day. There are literally hundreds of them with greater or lesser importance, there’s probably an” International Eat A Cake Day”. Today has been designated International IPv6 Day, which may sound a lot less interesting but will have a much greater effect on you than you may realise.
What’s IPv6 and why are we having a special day for it you may well be asking. Well it is one of those moments in time when we realise that we have totally underestimated something, a bit like when Bill Gates allegedly said “640K of RAM ought to be enough for anybody”. In this case we are talking about the number of IP addresses that can exist. An IP address is a unique number that is assigned to an individual device that is connected to the Internet, “IP” stands for Internet Protocol. The reason that we need IP addresses is so that individual devices can communicate with each other. If you send an email to me then you, and I, want to know that it will arrive on my machine and not somebody else’s. The IP address helps to alleviate this problem.
A good analogy would be the telephone system. Your house will probably have a landline. Notice I have said “probably”, I have been careful to use that word so some of my more pedantic friends do not start bombarding me with emails to say that they don’t have a landline and simply use their mobile device to do everything. I’m starting to ramble, so let’s get back to the gripping subject of IP addresses…
You probably have a landline in your house and that telephone is assigned a specific telephone number so when I dial your number I know that the phone in your house will ring. IP addresses are very similar in nature. Websites are all assigned an IP address that will look something like 192.185.75.12, now trying to remember that type of number for every website you visit would not be easy so we instead use domain names and every domain name maps to a specific IP address. These are more like the way you store telephone numbers in your mobile, you don’t need to know the number we just choose the name because we remember names more easily than telephone numbers.
The problem that we currently have is that we are running out of IP addresses. IPv4, the current version can support approximately 4.3 billion addresses, which may sound like a lot but when you think that every device that is connected to the internet is allocated an IP address then you might be surprised that they have lasted this long. Think about how many devices you have? PC’s, Mac’s, Tablets, Netbooks, Printers, iPads, smartphones and more devices are able to connect to the Internet on a daily basis and all the IPv4 addresses are now accounted for, though they have not yet all been allocated. With the emerging technology markets of China and Africa meaning that literally billions of new devices will go online in the next few years then it is apparent that something needs to change and change fast.
Enter IPv6. This is a protocol that will allow far more items to be allocated IP addresses 3.4 trillion trillion trillion to be exact and they should keep us going for a good while longer. The purpose of today was to test the new system. Many major players on the web including Facebook, Google and Yahoo have signed up to take part in the day. Taking part means that these sites will provide versions of their sites that can be accessed either using IPv4 or IPv6. Most browsers and PC’s should have no problem accessing sites that use IPv6 but some routers may do. You can see if you will be affected by running the test that can be found at test-ipv6.com.
The test will run from 01:00 BST on 08 June 2011 until 01:00 BST on 09 June 2011. The time now is 18:19 and so far no major issues have been reported, but we may not know for sure until the techies have poured over their stats in the next couple of days.
In reality this is probably less exciting than the supposed Rapture that was supposed to happen a couple of weeks ago but potentially this could have more of an impact on you, me and everybody else in the online world.
If you have experienced anything, good or bad, regarding IPv6 Day then why not leave me a comment?