Shortage Of IP Addresses Is On Facebook's To-Do List

Facebook’s strategy of reaching out to other sites outside of the actual social network would plateau if the Internet runs out of addresses (again).
 

To help prevent that, Facebook has just announced its particpation in World IPv6 Day on June 8 of this year, when the social network joins other major Internet companies test driving a new Internet addressing scheme called IPv6 (today’s addresses all use IPv4).

The new protocol provides four billion times as many addresses as the current one, says Donn Lee on the Facebook Engineering blog today. Like his post says:

Testing IPv6 is important because recent studies indicate about 0.05% of Internet users (1 in 2,000) can’t reliably connect to websites that enable both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses (known as “dual-stacked” websites). This has resulted in a classic chicken-and-egg puzzle right now: websites don’t want to enable IPv6 because a small number of their users may have trouble connecting. At the same time, doing nothing means that ever more users will have trouble connecting to these dual-stacked websites, and ISPs will turn to less effective technical alternatives…

To break this conundrum, we need to take a small, concerted step for just 24 hours, where Web companies, ISPs, hardware/software makers, and users work together and synchronize plans, communication, and support.

The ISOC offers you a way to test your readiness for the new addressing protocol by visiting the link above that takes you to the address test-ipv6.com. According to that widget, I’m not ready at all, although that really means my Internet service provider needs to get on the case.

Already, Google, Yahoo, Akamai and Limelight Networks have agreed to participate in World IPv6 Day along with Facebook, and the Internet Sociey actively seeks additional participants.

Will you or your employer sign up to participate in World IPv6 day?

Source : Google blogsearch