Internet gets big upgrade on Wednesday

This is it: The Internet is getting a major overhaul on June 7, with most users hopefully not having to go through transition pains.

 

Major players on the Internet are leading the roll out of IPv6 to replace the current IPv4, so the Internet can continue to grow.

 

“World IPv6 Launch Day is a lot larger than people understand. IPv6 is the single largest upgrade in the history of the Internet. It’s not a small decision for the major content providers to turn on IPv6 and leave it on," John Curran, president and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers, told tech site Mashable in an email.

 

Overseeing the launch of IPv6 is the Internet Society, a standards and advocacy group.

 

At worst, Curran said Internet users visiting sites that do not upgrade to IPv6 will have to go through transition gateways, experiencing slower connections and services.

 

But if the transition is done properly, he said Internet users globally "will not notice any significant difference in their daily lives.”

 

Mashable said "hundreds" of major Internet entities are making the switch, including Google, Facebook and Time Warner Cable. IPv6 testing

 

A separate article on tech site CNET said a 24-hour test of IPv6 was held a year ago.

 

CNET quoted Arbor Networks, which monitors global Internet traffic, as saying IPv6 is being enabled and kept on by more than 1,500 Web sites and ISPs in 22 countries.

 

IPv6 is the sixth revision to the Internet Protocol and functions similarly to IPv4 - the difference being it uses 128-bit addresses instead of IPv4's 32-bit addresses.

 

Running out of room

 

CNET said the Internet is running out of room as IPv4, which is used to describe the network address Internet-connected devices, offers only 4.3 billion addresses or 2 to the 32nd power - and those are quickly being used up.

 

In contrast, IPv6 offers 340 undecillion addresses or 2 to the 128th power.

 

However, CNET said upgrading the entire Internet would entail much money and work - even as most in the computing industry tend to put it off until absolutely necessary.

 

"You've been able to create IPv6 networks since 1999, but there's been little point until relatively recently. Many people didn't have computers, home networking equipment, or Internet service providers that could reach IPv6 sites on the Net, and Web sites had little incentive to make their sites available over IPv6. But that's changing now," it said.

 

Fast growth

 

CNET said that while the fraction of Internet traffic will be small, it will grow fast.

 

It said Yahoo properties that will become IPv6-enabled Wednesday include the main Yahoo.com Web site, My Yahoo, and OMG.

 

"For the IPv6-enabled sites, I expect to see roughly half a percent. In a year, in the realm of 10 to 15 percent," said Jason Fesler, Yahoo's IPv6 evangelist.

 

Arbor Networks, which scrutinizes anonymous data from 253 Internet service providers, 125 of which carry IPv6 traffic today, measured a flow of 10 gigabits per second of IP traffic flowing, said product manager Scott Iekel-Johnson.

 

That translates to 0.04 percent of the total Internet traffic on Atlas, and 0.09 percent of the traffic on the IPv6-carrying ISPs, he said.

 

But Hurricane Electric, a networking company that's been pushing IPv6 technology and services for more than a decade, is seeing the evidence that the shift to IPv6 is real.

 

"Hurricane Electric's professional services group has seen a more than fivefold increase in people wanting us to provide courses and consulting to help them plan and deploy IPv6 over the last two months," said Owen DeLong, the company's IPv6 evangelist and director of professional services.

 

For its part, Cisco predicted "there will be 8 billion IPv6-capable fixed and mobile devices in 2016, up from 1 billion in 2011.

 

"Globally, 40 percent of all fixed and mobile networked devices will be IPv6-capable in 2016, up from 10 percent in 2011," it said.

 

Cisco Fellow Mark Townsley said IPv6 support is arriving at the two ends of the network connection, and that will push ISPs and other network companies to add their own support so the IPv6 connection actually can be made.

 

"On the content side, we're seeing 50, 60, or 70 percent of content available over IPv6 available by year end," he said.

 

OSes with IPv6 support

 

Townsley said that while Windows XP does not have IPv6 support enabled by default, it'll fade from the scene.

 

"The good news is, while 30 to 40 percent of PCs that don't have IPv6 by default, in the next two years, that's dropping down to fractional numbers -- 1 to 2 percent," he said.

 

In contrast, devices running Google's Android and Apple's iOS, as well as newer versions of Microsoft's Windows and Apple's OS X, have IPv6 support.

 

'Trouble' at transition

 

CNET said there may be problems for "a small slice of people" in transiting to IPv6, but not for the majority.

 

Yahoo, which participated in last year's IPv6 test, noted the fraction of its visitors who had problems when IPv6 is enabled.

 

"Weeks before the World IPv6 Day 2011, it was roughly 0.055 percent. A week after, that number was down to 0.022 percent, with a great number of people learning their systems were 'broken' and taking steps to fix it," Fesler said. 

 

But he said that since last year, they had seen a steady rise back towards 0.030 percent.

 

"Since few Web sites have been running IPv6, these users have had no reason to realize anything was wrong," he said.

 

Fesler theorized most of the issues are local to the user's computer, or the user's home network.

 

He said the problems may be related to the home wireless router they have - a few early IPv6 implementations did things that were ultimately found to not be in the customer's best interest.

 

In other cases, it may be related to the home computer. IPv6 might be enabled in the house -- but the firewall installed on the home computer may not be aware of IPv6 (and block the traffic). Or the customer may have enabled specific transitional technology that allows IPv4-only users to have an IPv6 address using public gateways.

 

Other problems outside a person's control can crop up as IPv6 and IPv4 coexist side by side, with gateway devices trying to bridge between the two. That could show up as slow access to some sites.

 

CNET quoted Yahoo as saying Japan in particular has some problems, since some ISPs have deployed IPv6 to let their subscribers access particular services such as phone and television that aren't part of the broader Internet, Fesler said.

 

"There is a roughly 1 second delay for Windows users, before giving up on IPv6 and trying IPv4 instead," Fesler said.

 

"This problem is not just for the connection to the Web site, but also for connections to get images on the page and other resources needed to fully draw the Web site," he added. — TJD, GMA News