The New Zealand IPv6 Task Force put its weight behind World IPv6 Day in June, engaging in several promotional activities to help spread the IPv6 adoption message locally.
World IPv6 Day was a global event sponsored and organised by the international Internet Society (ISOC) and supported by numerous large content providers. The intent of the day was to encourage participants to test deployment of IPv6 on their public facing websites.
It ran over 24 hours, from 00:00 to 23:59 UTC (from 12 noon New Zealand time) on 8 June 2011.
World IPv6 Day aimed to motivate all organisations to present their services on both IPv4 and IPv6 for the entire 24 hour period. On the day major providers including Google, Facebook and Yahoo were among many global firms who took part.
Global impact of World IPv6 Day
Alongside the major content providers, over 400 other organisations signed up with ISOC . It is encouraging to note that many of their websites remain IPv6-enabled today.
www.worldipv6day.org/participants/index.html .
Note: ISOC maintains a list of over 700 websites that were already IPv6-enabled.
For a before-and-after overview of the IPv6 status of participating organisations visit www.mrp.net/WorldIPv6Day.html .
One of the interesting aspects about World IPv6 Day is that if everything went according to plan, then there would be no significant change in Internet experience for the average user. In this regard World IPv6 Day was an unmitigated success. Some of the largest content providers on the Internet were able to enable IPv6 on their services with little to no impact on their customers.
According to Wikipedia, “the Day passed according to plan and without significant problems for the participants. Cisco and Google reported no significant issues during the test. Facebook called the results encouraging, and decided to leave their developer site IPv6-enabled as a result. But the consensus was that more work needed to be done before IPv6 could consistently be applied”.
For its part, the New Zealand IPv6 Task Force:
- Registered with ISOC as a supporting organisation and strongly encouraged all New Zealand content providers and ISPs to also take part.
- Spoke at a video seminar entitled ‘IPv6 through the crystal ball. What a future with IPv6 might look like’.
- Spoke to NZ Tech Podcast about World IPv6 Day and the critical importance of local IPv6 adoption. http://nztechpodcast.com/nz-tech-podcast-episode-14
- Repeated its survey of IPv6 readiness in New Zealand, with preliminary results made available on World IPv6 Day.
- Promoted the ‘IPv6 Check’ widget, accessible at www.ipv6.org.nz
- Worked with Task Force members FX Networks and Fujitsu NZ to live-stream the dawn of World IPv6 Day (NZT) with an IPv6-enabled web-cam.
- Task Force member TelstraClear made its main websites accessible via IPv6 on World IPv6 Day. It also assisted with enabling IPv6 on the Flybuys website.
- ICT services firm Gen-i (on behalf of Task Force member Telecom) launched a target dual-stack test webpage for World IPv6 Day, along with a link to an information page – www.ipv6test.co.nz.
- On World IPv6 Day there was a 400 percent increase in visits to the Task Force’s website and a significant increase in the amount of IPv6 traffic traversing the .nz name space. The namespace graphs are available at www.ipv6.org.nz/2011/06/09/world-ipv6-day-sees-increase-in-v6-traffic-to-nz
- There was also a steady stream of social media on Twitter and local media coverage as a result of Task Force press releases. Articles ran in print, audio and television: www.ipv6.org.nz/2011/06/08/nz-media-coverage-world-ipv6-day