Google, Other Major Internet Players to Enable IPv6 for 24 Hours to Spur Take-Up
The Internet Society’s June 8 World Internet Protocol version 6 Day will be a “global-scale test flight,” aimed at nudging the Internet sector to prepare for the new technology as IPv4 addresses run out, ISOC Technology Program Manager Phil Roberts said Friday. Major industry players will enable IPv6 on their main websites for 24 hours, he said in an email. IPv4 access will also be still be available, he said. “Minor technical glitches” may occur, but the trial run will allow participating organizations to work with operating system manufacturers, home route vendors and ISPs to tackle them, he said. Several more tests will likely be needed as IPv6 is rolled out, said Google Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf.
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ISOC created the event to raise awareness of IPv6 and give industry a chance to test for readiness, said NTT America Chief Technology Officer Doug Junkins. The company has offered IPv6 services since 2004, and 20 percent of its customers have purchased IPv6 transit, he said. The event is about getting major Internet companies to commit to enabling IPv6, he said. Until now, there’s been little motivation for businesses to make the switch because there was little immediate payback from their infrastructure upgrades, he said in an email.
Now, instead of waiting for the IPv6 “killer app” to emerge, industry is waking up to the fact that the actual killer app is the “continued availability of the Internet overall,” Junkins said. The hope is that once the major Internet companies are on board, others will follow suit, he said. By testing the technology in a controlled environment, any global scalability problems can be identified, fixed and resolved before large-scale deployment takes place, he said.
That Google, Facebook and Yahoo are taking part shows that IPv6 deployment is serious, Roberts said. It’s also clear that the broad Internet industry has taken note of this, he said. Other participants include Akamai, Limelight Networks, Cisco, World Wide Web Consortium, Microsoft Bing and VeriSign, the ISOC website said. Hosting companies such as Comcast and Time Warner Cable are involved, it said. The number of companies taking part continues to grow and includes many from the developing world, Roberts said.
It’s hard to say whether the test will change any perceptions, Cerf said in an email. Regional Internet Registries will run out of IPv4 allocations to ISPs this year or early next, he said. Upgrade costs vary widely, he said; most users have edge software that can already work but intermediate devices may be needed.
"The argument that consumers are not asking for IPv6 is silly on the face of it,” Cerf said. Users haven’t had to know anything about IPv4 for the Internet to work for them, and there’s no reason they should know about, and ask for, the newer technology, he said. ISPs and application service providers should be working to implement the expanded address space and IPv6 protocol for the benefit of all users, he said. “I don’t know whether the ISPs will change their minds after this test,” he said, but he hopes press reports point out that the Internet can’t continue to serve an increasingly large population of users without IPv6.
The alternative, cascading network address translation devices, is fragile, poses security risks and can’t expand to the same scale as IPv6, Cerf said. Moreover, as IPv4 addresses run out, there will be attempts to sell IPv4 address space by those who have an excess of it, he said. That will break routers that lack sufficient routing table space to handle an increasingly fragmented IPv4 space, and hike the cost of Internet access due to “market pricing” for IPv4 addresses, he said. The cheaper alterative is to install IPv6 in parallel with IPv4, he said.
ISOC has also set up www.test-ipv6.com, where consumers can test their networks for IPv6 compatibility, Junkins said. If they're incompatible, that may prompt users to contact their ISPs, he said.
On June 8, domain name lookups will include IPv6 as well as IPv4 addresses for websites testing IPv6, Cerf said. For users whose software works for both and whose ISPs are serving IPv6 protocol, “things will look pretty much the same,” he said.
But some users may have misconfigured laptops, desktops, firewalls or network address translation boxes, particularly at home, that won’t work properly, Cerf said. Some may experience very long “time-outs” waiting for IPv6 responses, as long as 75 seconds, before their equipment switches back to IPv4, he said. Some may simply fail to reach their destination and some intermediate devices may not know what to do with IPv6 packets, he said. “The possible number of failure combinations is large and impossible to catalog fully,” he said.
It’s estimated that about 5 percent of users may encounter problems, Roberts said. If that happens, users should report the problem to their service providers and, if immediate access to the site is needed, disable IPv6 immediately, he said. Service providers need to learn about the glitches so they can find a permanent fix that improves IPv6 connectivity, he said.