IPv6 alliance looks to ramp-up interest and uptake

An alliance of website operators, network operators and router manufacturers have designated today World IPv6 Launch day. The campaign is designed to ensure the broadest uptake and permanent enablement by infrastructure providers of the 128-bit Internet-layer protocol. IPv6 allows vastly more IP addresses than 32-bit IPv4, which is running out of address space with the burgeoning number of Internet-enabled mobile devices.

IPv6 offers a potential 340 trillion trillion trillion unique addresses against IPv4’s mere four billion, according to IPv6.org.

Akamai, Comcast, Google, Time Warner Cable, AT&T, D-Link, Cisco, Facebook, Microsoft Bing and Yahoo are among the participating companies.

Campaigners face an uphill battle, despite the obvious limitation of four billion IP addresses in a world of nearly seven billion people, about one third of whom are online, often with multiple devices.

To date, IPv6 deployment has been slow and accounts for a tiny percentage of Internet traffic.

Today’s ‘launch’ (IPv6 was developed in 1990) is designed to provide an "accelerated timeline", say organisers.

World IPv6 Launch day is not the first such event: World IPv6 Day passed almost unnoticed in 2011, leading the campaigners to add a ‘This time it’s for real’ tagline to the 2012 campaign.