Last year, World IPv6 Day was held on 8 June, where lots of well-known (and some not-so-well-known) Internet sites turned on IPv6 for a day to see what would happen.  Well, the Internet Society have come up with a sequel, called “World IPv6 Launch” – to be held on 6 June this year – and this time the plan is not to switch the IPv6 off.

Major companies such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo! and the Bing division of Microsoft are taking part, which is probably a large proportion of the IPv4 traffic currently going and up down the Internet today, so it will be interesting to see what effect turning on IPv6 will have.  Although it must be said that most ISPs in the UK have been very slow to roll out IPv6, some have and this will at last mean that we get to talk to all these big sites over the new protocol at last.

I’ve never really made a big secret of the fact that I think the UK ISPs really need to get a move-on with the v6 rollout – at the time of writing, the predictions are that RIPE will run out of IPv4 addresses around the end of July, so time is now of the essence.  What are you all waiting for?! (I suspect the answer is “someone else to do it first”)

More details at http://www.worldipv6launch.org/