World IPv6 Day was a technical testing and publicity event in 2011 sponsored and organized by the Internet Society and several large Internet content services to test and promote public IPv6 deployment. [1] Following the success of the 2011 test day, the Internet Society carried out a World IPv6 Launch day on June 6, 2012 which, instead of just a test day, was planned to permanently enable IPv6 for the products and services of the participants. [2]
World IPv6 Day was announced on January 12, 2011 with five anchoring companies: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Akamai Technologies, and Limelight Networks. [3] The event started at 00:00 UTC on June 8, 2011 and ended 23:59 the same day. [4] The main motivation for the event was to evaluate the real world effects of the IPv6 brokenness as seen by various synthetic tests. To this end, during World IPv6 Day major web companies and other industry players enabled IPv6 on their main websites for 24 hours. An additional goal was to motivate organizations across the industry – Internet service providers, hardware makers, operating system vendors and web companies – to prepare their services for IPv6, so as to ensure a successful transition from IPv4 as address space runs out [5]
The test primarily consisted of websites publishing AAAA records, which allow IPv6 capable hosts to connect using IPv6. Although Internet service providers (ISP) have been encouraged to participate, they were not expected to deploy anything active on that day, just increase their readiness to handle support issues. The concept was widely discussed at the 2010 Google IPv6 Conference. [6]
Many companies and organizations participated in the experiment, including the largest search engines, social networking websites and Internet backbone & content distribution networks. [7]
There were more than 400 participants in the original World IPv6 Day. [8] included some of the most heavily accessed destinations on the Internet, content distribution networks, [9] as well as various Internet service and infrastructure providers including: [10] Comcast, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Yandex [11] YouTube, Akamai Technologies, Limelight Networks, Microsoft, Vonage, AOL, Mapquest, T-Online, Cisco, Juniper Networks, Huawei, the US Department of Commerce, MasterCard, the BBC, and Telmex.
Major carriers measured the percentage of IPv6 traffic of all Internet traffic as increasing from 0.024 to 0.041 with respect to native and tunneled stacks combined.[ citation needed ] Most IPv6 traffic in consumer access networks was to Google sites. Demonstrating the need for content sites to adopt IPv6 for success, the biggest increase was actually in 6to4 transitional technologies. Early results indicated that the day passed according to plan and without significant problems for the participants. [12]
Cisco and Google reported no significant issues during the test. [13] [14] Facebook called the results encouraging, and decided to leave their developer site IPv6-enabled as a result. [15] But the consensus was that more work needed to be done before IPv6 could consistently be applied. [16] [17]
The participants said they would continue to perform detailed analyses of the data. Many participants found it worthwhile to continue to maintain dual-stacks. [18]
Following the success of the original World IPv6 Day, the exercise was repeated on June 6, 2012 as the World IPv6 Launch, this time with the intention of leaving IPv6 permanently enabled on all participating sites. [19] The event was billed as "this time, it's for real". [20]
Participants in the World IPv6 Launch included participants from the 2011 test day, and many more, including the Wikimedia Foundation, which permanently enabled IPv6 on its sites, including Wikipedia.
According to Alain Fiocco of Cisco, content that currently receives roughly 30% of global World Wide Web IPv4 pageviews should now have become available via IPv6 after World IPv6 Launch Day. [21] IPv6 traffic on AMS-IX rose by 50% on the launch day, from 2 Gbit/s to 3 Gbit/s. [22] IPv6 traffic on Amsterdam Internet Exchange was measured by ether type distribution as 0.4 percent, while IPv4 was measured as 99.6 percent on average in both daily and weekly graphs. [23]
The Internet is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a network of networks that consists of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast range of information resources and services, such as the interlinked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail, telephony, and file sharing.
Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) is the fourth version of the Internet Protocol (IP). It is one of the core protocols of standards-based internetworking methods in the Internet and other packet-switched networks. IPv4 was the first version deployed for production on SATNET in 1982 and on the ARPANET in January 1983. It is still used to route most Internet traffic today, even with the ongoing deployment of Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), its successor.
Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP), the communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic across the Internet. IPv6 was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to deal with the long-anticipated problem of IPv4 address exhaustion, and was intended to replace IPv4. In December 1998, IPv6 became a Draft Standard for the IETF, which subsequently ratified it as an Internet Standard on 14 July 2017.
The Internet Protocol (IP) is the network layer communications protocol in the Internet protocol suite for relaying datagrams across network boundaries. Its routing function enables internetworking, and essentially establishes the Internet.
A multicast address is a logical identifier for a group of hosts in a computer network that are available to process datagrams or frames intended to be multicast for a designated network service. Multicast addressing can be used in the link layer, such as Ethernet multicast, and at the internet layer for Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4) or Version 6 (IPv6) multicast.
A virtual private network (VPN) is a mechanism for creating a secure connection between a computing device and a computer network, or between two networks, using an insecure communication medium such as the public Internet.
A subnetwork, or subnet, is a logical subdivision of an IP network. The practice of dividing a network into two or more networks is called subnetting.
Anycast is a network addressing and routing methodology in which a single IP address is shared by devices in multiple locations. Routers direct packets addressed to this destination to the location nearest the sender, using their normal decision-making algorithms, typically the lowest number of BGP network hops. Anycast routing is widely used by content delivery networks such as web and name servers, to bring their content closer to end users.
The Toronto Internet Exchange Community (TorIX) is a not-for-profit Internet Exchange Point (IXP) located in a carrier hotel at 151 Front Street West, Equinix's TR2 data centre at 45 Parliament Street and 905 King Street West in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. As of March 2021, TorIX has 259 unique autonomous systems representing 285 peer connections and peak traffic rates of 1.344 Tbps, making it the largest IXP in Canada. According to Wikipedia's List of Internet Exchange Points by Size, TorIX is the 16th largest IXP in the world in numbers of peers, and 17th in the world in traffic averages. The Exchange is organized and run by industry professionals in voluntary capacity.
IPv4 address exhaustion is the depletion of the pool of unallocated IPv4 addresses. Because the original Internet architecture had fewer than 4.3 billion addresses available, depletion has been anticipated since the late 1980s when the Internet started experiencing dramatic growth. This depletion is one of the reasons for the development and deployment of its successor protocol, IPv6. IPv4 and IPv6 coexist on the Internet.
The China Next Generation Internet (CNGI) project is an ongoing plan for the accelerated rollout and application of the IPv6 protocol nationwide.
An IPv6 transition mechanism is a technology that facilitates the transitioning of the Internet from the Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) infrastructure in use since 1983 to the successor addressing and routing system of Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6). As IPv4 and IPv6 networks are not directly interoperable, transition technologies are designed to permit hosts on either network type to communicate with any other host.
The deployment of IPv6, the latest version of the Internet Protocol (IP), has been in progress since the mid-2000s. IPv6 was designed as the successor protocol for IPv4 with an expanded addressing space. IPv4, which has been in use since 1982, is in the final stages of exhausting its unallocated address space, but still carries most Internet traffic.
Proxy Mobile IPv6 is a network-based mobility management protocol standardized by IETF and is specified in RFC 5213. It is a protocol for building a common and access technology independent of mobile core networks, accommodating various access technologies such as WiMAX, 3GPP, 3GPP2 and WLAN based access architectures. Proxy Mobile IPv6 is the only network-based mobility management protocol standardized by IETF.
Hurricane Electric is a global Internet service provider offering Internet transit, tools, and network applications, as well as data center colocation and hosting services at two locations in Fremont, California, where the company is based.
6rd is a mechanism to facilitate IPv6 rapid deployment across IPv4 infrastructures of Internet service providers (ISPs).
NAT64 is an IPv6 transition mechanism that facilitates communication between IPv6 and IPv4 hosts by using a form of network address translation (NAT). The NAT64 gateway is a translator between IPv4 and IPv6 protocols, for which function it needs at least one IPv4 address and an IPv6 network segment comprising a 32-bit address space. The "well-known prefix" reserved for this service is 64:ff9b::/96.
In the field of IPv6 deployment, IPv6 brokenness was bad behavior seen in early tunneled or dual stack IPv6 deployments where unreliable or bogus IPv6 connectivity is chosen in preference to working IPv4 connectivity. This often resulted in long delays in web page loading, where the user had to wait for each attempted IPv6 connection to time out before the IPv4 connection was tried. These timeouts ranged from being near-instantaneous in the best cases, to taking anywhere between four seconds to three minutes.
Rémi Després is a French engineer and entrepreneur known for his contributions on data networking.
Happy Eyeballs is an algorithm published by the IETF that makes dual-stack applications more responsive to users by attempting to connect using both IPv4 and IPv6 at the same time, thus minimizing common problems experienced by users with imperfect IPv6 connections or setups. The name "happy eyeballs" derives from the term "eyeball" to describe endpoints which represent human Internet end-users, as opposed to servers.