In 1977, father of Internet, Vint Cerf was the program manager for the ARPA Internet research project; he created IPv4 and chose a 32-bit address format for an experiment in packet network interconnection.
And that was the beginning; for more than 30 years IPv4 was used to connect billions of people all around the world until the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced that it has distributed the last batch of its remaining IPv4 addresses to the world’s five Regional Internet Registries (RIR), the organizations that manage IP addresses in different regions. These Registries will begin assigning the final IPv4 addresses within their regions until they run out completely, which could come as soon as early 2012.
So now what?
IPv6 (with 128 bits address size, that is 2128 IP addresses) must be adopted for continued Internet growth.
However, Internet users won’t notice the effect of IPv4 depletion in the foreseeable future, but in the future there may be parts of the Internet that you cannot reach if the website or service is an IPv6 only network, and your Internet Service Provider (ISP) does not provide its customers with IPv6 addresses.
As a response, the Internet Society (IS) and large site operators, like Google, Facebook, and Yahoo, have agreed to test their readiness for IPv6 and announced for “World IPv6 Day”. A 24 hours test period for the Internet’s savior in which the participants will offer their content over IPv6. The goal of the Test Flight Day is to motivate organizations across the industry – Internet service providers, hardware manufacturers, operating system vendors and web companies – to prepare their services for IPv6 to ensure a successful transition.
So are you ready?
Transition to IPv6