LEARN News & Highlights
LEARN Joins World IPv6 Day Activities
On June 8th, 2011, LEARN will be joining the list of organizations that will participate in World IPv6 Day by making the website at www.tx-learn.net available via Internet Protocol version 6. LEARN will be joining with Facebook, Google, Yahoo! and many other commercial, government, and educational websites around the world for a twenty-four hour test of IPv6 deployment.
Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) was originally defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in September of 1981. IPv4 uses a 32 bit addressing scheme that allows for a maximum 4.3 billion addresses. According to the World Bank, the world population was approximately 6.7 billion people in 2009. With the ever expanding use of the Internet as a primary means of communication, commerce, and entertainment, it has become clear that the IPv4 addressing scheme is inadequate to meet the needs of the global community.
Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) was developed by the IETF in December of 1998 to address the problems of the eventual exhaustion of the IPv4 address space. IPv6 uses a 128 bit addressing scheme that allows for a maximum of 340 undecillion or 3.4 x 1038 addresses. Using the 2009 population numbers, that provides approximately 50 x 1027 addresses per person worldwide. Over the last decade, hardware and software developers have been working hard to support this new addressing scheme.
On January 31, 2011, IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, exhausted the "free pool" of IPv4 address space available to assign to the five regional Internet registries (RIR). On April 15, 2011, the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) entered IPv4 Exhaustion Stage 3, which means that they have less than 16 million IPv4 addresses to assign to Internet Service Providers in the densely populated Asia/Pacific region of the world. As of May 2011, The American Registry of Internet Numbers had only 83 million addresses left to assign to ISPs in the North American region. With the growing use of Internet capable smartphones, this number is expected to be depleted quickly.
One of the main goals of World IPv6 Day is to expose problems with existing Internet services and address them quickly. Most users should see no interruption in Internet services during World IPv6 Day, but in a few rare cases, services to users may be impacted. By working with service providers and equipment manufacturers, the participating organizations hope to minimize the impact to Internet users. Participating organizations will also be sharing tools used to detect problems with existing IPv6 implementations.
If you would like more information regarding World IPv6 Day, please go to the World IPv6 Day webpage at http://isoc.org/wp/worldipv6day/. If you have questions regarding LEARN's participation in World IPv6 day, please contact the LEARN Network Operations Center (NOC) at noc@tx-learn.net or 1-866-647-8728.