Media Release – 6 June 2012 – Today at midday New Zealand time, major global Internet companies including Facebook, Google and Yahoo will permanently enable IPv6 for their products and services.
Organised by the global Internet Society, ‘World IPv6 Launch’ aims to motivate organisations across industry – including Internet service providers, hardware makers, and web companies – to prepare for and switch on IPv6. This is a major step that will give confidence to all corporate, government, and small businesses to move to this next generation Internet addressing protocol.
The New Zealand IPv6 Task Force fully backs World IPv6 Launch and has registered as a participating organisation. Task Force Convenor Murray Milner says the support the Launch has gained from such major service and content players is testament to the vital importance of IPv6 adoption.
“The clear message coming from World IPv6 Launch is to turn IPv6 on and leave it on. The world’s available pool of IPv4 addresses has dwindled to nothing and, without the addressing capabilities of IPv6, the Internet cannot continue to grow.”
In New Zealand, the IPv6 Task Force promotes the adoption of IPv6 throughout the Internet user, public sector and business communities. Milner says all New Zealand organisations should be acutely aware of and planning for IPv6 adoption on their internal networks. Not doing so is a very real business risk.
“For those that haven’t adopted IPv6, the biggest issue in the short term may be lack of access to parts of the global Internet. Some countries, notably India and China have already run out of IPv4 addresses and they are developing Internet applications using IPv6. Some of those applications will not be visible to New Zealand entities if they don’t have IPv6 capability.”
More information about the IPv6 Task Force and its activities is available at www.ipv6.org.nz. There is information about New Zealand’s overall state of IPv6 readiness and a Service Directory for helping organisations getting started on an IPv6 adoption path.
More details about World IPv6 Launch are available at www.worldipv6launch.org.
For further comment, please contact:
Murray Milner
Convenor
New Zealand IPv6 Task Force
027 443 0120
[email protected]
or
Dean Pemberton
Technical Convenor
New Zealand IPv6 Task Force
021 920 363
[email protected]
or
Donald Clark
New Zealand IPv6 Task Force
021 536 090
[email protected]