World IPv6 Day: What We Learned

One of the greatest challenges facing an organization that wants to migrate to IPv6 is that the protocol is not supported on all clients. In fact, it is estimated that 1/2000 of clients will be unable to connect to a dual-stack site.

This poses an interesting question; who goes first? Enabling IPv6 in the current climate means sending customers to the competition. But if no one goes first, IPv6 will never happen.

This is the motivating factor behind World IPv6 Day. Major content providers have agreed to simultaneously enable IPv6 for a 24-hour period in early June. What this means is that rather than one site seeming broken, the whole Internet will seem broken to clients with this problem, which will call attention to deficiencies in the infrastructure of the Internet, rather than to individual content providers.

Enabling IPv6 is a full stack exercise – everything from routers to applications needs to be adapted to work with the new protocols. The purpose of this session is to share lessons learned in the preparation for World IPv6 day, and discoveries made on the day itself.