Friday, January 20, 2012

IPv6 chooses D-Day for World Launch Date

IPv6 chooses D-Day for World Launch Date

We normally associate the day 6th June with D-Day (1944) because of an incredible wartime historical event which occurred that day triggering the 6th June to be remembered ever since: weblink d-day-6th-june.html.

It may not seem too strange then that where a war campaign that was cleverly and strategically planned and in its execution changed the course of World War II, that perhaps a planned event by the organisers of the World Launch of IPv6 might equally want to demonstrate a technological feat they are bringing about.

Why is IPv6 being launched? We're told that given the huge increase in the global population using the internet and its services and the natural consequences of that there are a disparate range of devices the load is draining the IP address resources. The current encumbent IPv4 is limited to support approxiamtely 4-billion (four billion) IP addresses and is well on it way to running out of addresses. IPv6 on the other hand it is said to be capable of supporting "340 trillion, trillion, trillion addresses". Of course there is more to IPv6 than that but primarily without upgrading to the new IP addressing system will problems can occur down the line.

Links to learn more about IPv4/IPv6:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6

IPv6 launch details:
http://www.worldipv6launch.org/
http://www.internetsociety.org/news/world-ipv6-launch-solidifies-global-support-new-internet-protocol

Coordinating the global internet marketplace players (thus collaboration with companies allied to the in-vision), deploying the capability to switch over systems and getting users to use IPv6 is perhaps where an analogy with D-Day might be implied. For the record, the Internet Society nor IPv6 World Launch have not stated any connection with D-Day, it is only my suggestion based upon the observation of the day IPv6 has choosen for a world launch. It might just seem a little far fetched though if the marketeers behind this launch suggested not recognising the day of the launch date as it would be for an imaginery group were they to choose the 4th July for the launch of a new global electricity meter that allows the meter usage numbering system to roll on indefinitely. In both case of IPv4 and current electricity meters both can run into difficulty if they don't upgrade sooner or later.

One question I do have? This IPv6, (and the same for electricity) is it going to cost less for us consumers to use it?  :-)

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