IPv6 works, says ISOC-AU

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 08 June 2011 18:25

Business IT - Networking

The Internet Society of Australia (ISOC-AU) has hailed global IPv6 day a success, at least from an Australian perspective, and says it is now ready for widespread adoption.

The vice president of ISOC-AU, and coordinator of Australia's IPv6 day activities, Narelle Clark, said: "The successful Australian test of IPv6 has cleared the way for full implementation."

For the day, over 400 web sites, including leading players Google, Facebook, Bing, Yahoo and others enabled their sites for IPv6.

Clark said that network administrators had been communicating for the last 48 hours preparing and managing IPv6 based networks for 8 June and: "Our conclusion from reports so far, is that IPv6 is ready for mainstream implementation, but more detailed analysis of IPv6 Day performance will continue to uncover any underlying issues, especially for the user experience with older equipment."

According to ISOC-AU, today, 8 June, "hundreds of Australian websites, organisations and individual Internet users took the opportunity to join the worldwide collaboration to begin operational implementation of IPv6 on the Internet."

ISOC-AU organised a special testing exercise where two school classes - at Waverley College and Wollondilly Anglican College - were given the challenge to 'break the Internet' on World IPv6 Day.

Participating students were given access to the IPv6 Internet courtesy of Studentnet and IPv6Now, even though the schools' current infrastructure only supports IPv4.

"Students responded spontaneously and enthusiastically," said Kevin Karp, director and business manager of IPv6Now and chair of the ISOC-AU Skills and Expertise Special Interest Group. "And they were asked to report their experience on a globally accessible database reporting user experiences."

Both groups of students started with a major search engine and found that they were routed to a Chinese language version of the popular site.

"This is an example of the type of unintended user experience that we were hoping to uncover," said Karp. "It will begin the process of refining the functioning of the Internet based on the IPv6 protocol, a process that has been underway for more than 20 years with the previous protocol, IPv4."