The Internet Didn’t End, but It Didn’t Jump into IPV6 Either

On June 6th the World IPv6 Launch marked the day when many ISPs, hardware makers, and web companies were supposed to switch over to using IPV6. This year was supposed to mark a permanent change to IPV6, as opposed to last year’s test run.

So how did it all go? Well there weren’t any major hiccups. In fact it’s hard to find any news stories on IPV6 Launch after it happened. That’s a good indication it all went well. Or that no one actually observed the day. What do the numbers say?

According to Sandivine the IPV6 traffic in the US went from .34% to .4% on June 6th. Sandivine points out that some of the major players on the internet did make some changes. Most of the increase in IPV6 traffic came from Netflix and YouTube.

But the fact that there isn’t much news to report, is good news. It means the transition to IPV6 is happening without any major side effects, albeit in a very slow fashion. No one knows when the process will be complete, but everyone agrees IPV4 and IPV6 will be playing together for quite some time. Much of the change will be policy based.

India, where 27 websites have been brought to IPV6 as of this World IPV6 Launch, issued a declaration that all government websites will be IPV6 by December 2012. In the US, President Obama issued a directive in 2010 that said all government sites would be IPV6 by fall 2012.

Everyone has to make the change eventually, but some won’t do it until they have to.

In the meantime if you are curious about whether your internet connection is IPV6 or not you can test it out. Test-IPV6.com runs a test on your connection and browser and reports back on how well it meets IPV6 standards and if you’ll be able to surf to IPV6 only websites. You’ll see by the image the results show that this connection wasn’t one of the lucky 1% of residential customers moved to IPV6 on June 6th.

Were you one of the lucky ones?