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 Deployment of the Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6), the latest generation of the Internet Protocol, has been in progress since the mid-2000s. IPv6 was designed as a replacement for IPv4. IPv4 has been in use since 1982, and is in the final stag ...

. 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.

World IPv6 Day

World IPv6 Day was announced on January 12, 2011 with five anchoring companies:

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

Yahoo Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo! Inc. (2017–present), Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds ma ...

, Akamai Technologies, and

Limelight Networks Edgio, Inc., formerly Limelight Networks, Inc., is an American company that provides a content delivery network (CDN) service, used for delivery of digital media content and software. As of January 2023, the company's network has more than 300 ...

. The event started at 00:00 UTC on June 8, 2011 and ended 23:59 the same day. 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 The test primarily consisted of websites publishing AAAA records, which allow IPv6 capable hosts to connect using IPv6. Although

Internet service provider An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise private ...

s (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. Many companies and organizations participated in the experiment, including the largest

search engine A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...

social networking A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods for an ...

websites and

Internet backbone The Internet backbone may be defined by the principal data routes between large, strategically interconnected computer networks and core routers of the Internet. These data routes are hosted by commercial, government, academic and other high-ca ...

content distribution networks A content delivery network, or content distribution network (CDN), is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. The goal is to provide high availability and performance by distributing the service spatially rel ...

Participants

There were more than 400 participants in the original World IPv6 Day. included some of the most heavily accessed destinations on the Internet,

, as well as various Internet service and infrastructure providers including:

Comcast Comcast Corporation (formerly known as American Cable Systems and Comcast Holdings),Before the AT&T merger in 2001, the parent company was Comcast Holdings Corporation. Comcast Holdings Corporation now refers to a subsidiary of Comcast Corpora ...

, Yandex

YouTube YouTube is a global online video platform, online video sharing and social media, social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by ...

, Akamai Technologies,

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

, Vonage,

AOL AOL (stylized as Aol., formerly a company known as AOL Inc. and originally known as America Online) is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City. It is a brand marketed by the current incarnation of Yahoo (2017� ...

, Mapquest, T-Online,

Cisco Cisco Systems, Inc., commonly known as Cisco, is an American-based multinational digital communications technology conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, ...

, Juniper Networks,

Huawei Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. ( ; ) is a Chinese multinational technology corporation headquartered in Shenzhen, Guangdong, China. It designs, develops, produces and sells telecommunications equipment, consumer electronics and various smar ...

, the

US Department of Commerce The United States Department of Commerce is an executive department of the U.S. federal government concerned with creating the conditions for economic growth and opportunity. Among its tasks are gathering economic and demographic data for busin ...

, MasterCard, the

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, and

Telmex Telmex is a Mexican telecommunications company headquartered in Mexico City that provides telecommunications products and services in Mexico. Telmex is still the dominant fixed-line phone carrier in Mexico. In addition to traditional fixed-line ...

Results

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. 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 6to4 is an Internet transition mechanism for migrating from Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) to version 6 (IPv6) and a system that allows IPv6 packets to be transmitted over an IPv4 network (generally the IPv4 Internet) without the need to co ...

transitional technologies. Early results indicated that the day passed according to plan and without significant problems for the participants.

and

reported no significant issues during the test. Facebook called the results encouraging, and decided to leave their developer site IPv6-enabled as a result. But the consensus was that more work needed to be done before IPv6 could consistently be applied. The participants said they would continue to perform detailed analyses of the data. Many participants found it worthwhile to continue to maintain dual-stacks.

World IPv6 Launch

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. The event was billed as "this time, it's for real".

Participants

Participants in the World IPv6 Launch included participants from the 2011 test day, and many more, including the

Wikimedia Foundation The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best kno ...

, which permanently enabled IPv6 on its sites, including

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...

Results

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. IPv6 traffic on AMS-IX rose by 50% on the launch day, from 2 Gbit/s to 3 Gbit/s. IPv6 traffic on AMS-IX 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.

References

External links

* *
After World IPv6 Day, what's next?
– Engineers from Cisco, Google,

Hurricane Electric 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 2 locations in Fremont, California, where the company is based. Accord ...

, and Yahoo! discuss the deployment work done for World IPv6 Day and share the experience learned.
Part 1Part 2Part 3
an
Part 4
of the seminar on

) {{IPv6 IPv6 2011 in computing 2012 in computing

World IPv6 Day

Participants

Results

World IPv6 Launch

Participants

Results

See also

References

External links