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It’s a big day for the internet … today is World IPv6 Day:

On 8 June, 2011, Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Akamai and Limelight Networks will be amongst some of the major organisations that will offer their content over IPv6 for a 24-hour “test flight”. The goal of the Test Flight Day is to motivate organizations across the industry – Internet service providers, hardware makers, operating system vendors and web companies – to prepare their services for IPv6 to ensure a successful transition as IPv4 addresses run out.

Why does IPv6 matter?

We’ve been running out of IPv4 addresses for some time on the Internet, but few sites already offer their services via the next generation of Internet addresses, IPv6. Despite the fact that we’re now down to the last few IP addresses, indeed Asia is already out, of major sites, only some of Google’s sites; Netflix, to a degree; Germany’s Heise Online; Facebook at www.v6.facebook.com; and Limelight currently offer IPv6 addressing on a regular basis.

IPv6 will increase the current 32-bit IPv4 addressing scheme to 128-bits, which means a lot more available addresses. “A lot” is a bit of an understatement, though:

So we could assign an IPV6 address to EVERY ATOM ON THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH, and still have enough addresses left to do another 100+ earths.

Yeah, wow.

While the average internet user probably won’t notice the eventual switchover to IPv6 it will be interesting to see how (and if) it affects internal/corporate networks. Instead of using addresses like:

• 192.168.1.1

we’ll be seeing things like

• 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334

Yikes! Time to start learning …