IPv6 Day Is Hailed As A Qualified Success

Donn is glad the Internet didn’t break today.

These were the sign-off words at the end of World IPv6 Day from Donn Lee, senior network engineer for Facebook’s Network Engineering Team.

Earlier yesterday, like over 400 of his peers, Lee located the red button, closed his eyes in silent prayer to Saint Vint (Cerf) the patron saint of mobile bits and bytes, and, with a single finger, symbolically pushed the world into a new era of networking.

Without the dramatic licence, June 8 was the day the world went IPv6 for the 24 hours, between 00:00 and 23:59 GMT.

Small Tremor, Not Many Injured

It was less of a gamble than Lee makes out because months of testing assured network managers that it would work, but there was a collective intake of breath nonetheless.

“We’re pleased that we did not see any increase in the number of users seeking help from our Help Centre. The estimated 0.03 percent of users who may have been affected would have experienced slow page loads during the test,” noted Lee.

The same glorious anticlimax was echoed across the Web as the new hexadecimal IP addresses held strong. The accepted figure for those who would experience problems is 0.05 percent which equates to just over a million users. Many of these would have experienced extended wait times or complete failure to load a Web page.

Since many adversely affected users will not report the fault or may not have been online during the 24-hour period, the figure has to be accepted on trust. The test participants, however, did seem satisfied with their results.

“We carried about 65 percent more IPv6 traffic than usual, saw no significant issues and did not have to disable IPv6 access for any networks or services,” observed Google’s Lorenzo Colitti, network engineer and ‘IPv6 Samurai’. “Over the next few weeks, we’ll be working together with the other participants to analyse the data we’ve collected but, at least on the surface, the first global test of IPv6 passed without incident.”

The Waiting Game Continues

This was just a test. A significant test but the reality in the UK is that few ISPs support the protocol. Entanet is one of the few who do. In a blog the ISP commissioned from Iain Shaw, managing director of leading UK buying group Brigantia, he explained the reasoning:

“The ISPs complain that hardware manufacturers have not yet developed enough supporting hardware to accommodate demand and therefore justify their investment in moving to IPv6, whilst the hardware manufacturers argue that they shouldn’t be developing the hardware until the networks can support it.”

It is a classic standoff, as ISPs and manufacturers watch and wait till one of them blinks – but fortunately, the hardware-makers have global interests so the UK market could be drip-fed products produced for the growing world market for IPv6 routers. Then it will be up to the ISPs to bite the bullet and decide how to upgrade their customers.

With IPv4 addresses running dry and none being available on the open Regional Internet Registry (RIR) market, time is running out. Version 4 and version 6 are incompatible so, for a while, dual stacks will be used to cater for the parallel systems but there is a danger that the end-users will suffer before any action is taken.

Is No News Good News?

For the time being the pain threshold is a long way off and the big news for World IPv6 Day is that there is no news – which means that the test was passed with flying colours.

“As we watched the various test sites and dashboards move to ‘green’ status for IPv6, sighs of relief were heard, followed by a sense of great satisfaction among everyone involved. twenty-four hours later, no major issues have been reported,” blogged Mark Townsley, a Cisco distinguished engineer with responsibility for the company’s IP switch-over. “All in all, World IPv6 Day seems to have gone off without a hitch.”

As a footnote, the IPv6 traffic accounted for around 0.3 percent of Internet traffic. According to Cisco’s recent Visual Networking Index, that means three petabytes of traffic from the estimated one exabyte of traffic per day – so the test was hardly exhaustive.

At Facebook, Lee reckoned that a million of the sites 250 million daily visitors (0.4 percent) connected via IPv6.