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Several technology companies on Wednesday celebrated World IPv6 Day, a historic moment when many big tech companies and Internet providers began switching to a new system for getting on the Web. Most of us will never even have to think about this...
But does anyone even really know what IPv6 is? The following is a quick explainer, in the form of an edited Q&A with Owen DeLong, a former networking engineer who is an IPv6 evangelist at Hurricane Electric, an Internet services company.
What is IPv6?
Every device that connects to the Internet has an address, called an IP address (for Internet protocol), which comes in a string of numbers. IPv6 is a new protocol for Internet addresses. The old protocol, known as IPv4, was designed to accommodate labs, universities and the military, when the Internet was being developed. That was an experimental Internet that only had 3.2 billion addresses — nowhere near enough for today’s exploding number of Web-connected computers, smartphones, tablets and game consoles.
IPv6 has a much larger address field: 3.4 x 1038. That’s enough that if you had an M&M for every address, you could fill up the Great Lakes, and take each of those M&Ms and fill the Great Lakes for each one of them. Literally the Great Lakes of M&Ms, squared.
Why should I care?
Ideally, if everything goes according to plan and all of us tech people do our jobs correctly, you shouldn’t. But in reality we care because we want the Internet to keep growing, and we want to be able to have new features and connect directly with each other.
What would happen if we ran out of addresses?
We’ve already been running out, and we’ve been using a method called Network Address Translation to share them. That has bought us an extra 20 years, but we’re coming to the end of that. Now we’re running out of addresses to share.
Running out of addresses doesn’t just degrade performance in terms of speed, but it also degrades performance in terms of what applications can do. It breaks things like VOIP, P2P or a lot of video game applications. For example, all these console games where you create a game and other people connect to a game console and you play interactively across the Internet. Those almost all break entirely.
Will it cost me more?
It shouldn’t cost anything more. None of the Internet providers that are providing IPv6 are charging more. For some people it is going to cost them once for hardware upgrades — potentially you might have to change your router or some of your older devices, but in terms of recurring charges it’s not going to cost more.
Am I on IPv6?
There are several ways to find out. The easiest is to go to one of the various IPv6 test sites on the Web, like Google’s.
Who’s on board with IPv6?
A lot of the top Web sites and a lot of the top Internet service providers. Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner and a few others are on board. So are Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Hurricane Electric.
For Internet service providers, on board doesn’t mean fully on board. It means they’ve committed to having at least 1 percent of subscribers with IPv6 access today.
If I have to buy new equipment, how can I know whether it’s IPv6 compliant?
Any equipment that is IPv6 capable should have an IPv6-ready logo. People should contact Internet service providers and ask them. If the service provider isn’t ready yet, then it needs to know that its customers want it. Buying new equipment doesn’t do customers any good before the providers are ready.
When do I need to switch by?
At this point, the sooner the better. I expect Europe to run out in the next few months. Asia, Australia and some of the island nations have already run out.
Source: bits.blogs.nytimes.com
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