World IPv6 Day is here!

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Today the Internet is test driving IPv6 and Plusnet is taking part. IPv6 is the latest version of the Internet protocol for assigning IP addresses. There are a finite limit of IP addresses using the old version IPv4 (about 4 billion) and these are quickly running out. As such the Internet community is beginning to transition to IPv6 with today marking the biggest event when many Internet Service Providers, Content Providers, End Users, Website hosts, Transit Providers and others are testing out IPv6 for 24 hours ahead of the IPv4 exhaustion. Global IP address allocation is controlled by an authority called IANA, they assign very large blocks of IP addresses to each region of the world. They recently handed out the last of these large blocks. Each region has an administrator that allocates IP addresses to Internet Service Providers like ourselves and others, it is anticapated that these regional administrators will begin to run out later this year. As the exhaustion of IPv4 is now getting closer the need for the Internet Community to transition to IPv6 is getting greater. Apart from providing more IP addresses than you can possibly imagine, IPv6 also allows people to provide a public IP address to pretty much any device they like on their home or office network. Most people will have a single public IP address which can present problems if you want to host services like your own website on your broadband connection or host online games as you need to set up rules on your router to achieve this. One of our customers, Mathew Newton has gone so far as to create an IPv6 enabled cat feeder on his home broadband connection to be able to feed his 2 cats Frankie and Elmo remotely. Mathew is taking part in our IPv6 trial and has opened up the cat feeder to anyone on IPv6 to feed the cats on IPv6 day. We at Plusnet have made our website www.plus.net and Community Site available on IPv6 for the day and have also enabled IPv6 on our broadband network and have about 25 customers and staff taking part in a trial of IPv6. Part of the behind the scenes work has been to configure the website to work over IPv6, set up DNS records and set up peering and transit links over IPv6 so that our 25 trial customers can get to the outside world on IPv6 and so that the rest of the Internet can get to our website. Our customers are using a variety of routers and modems for the trial, ZyXEL, Thomson and Netgear have all kindly supplied us with routers to test out. Not a lot of routers support IPv6 yet, however we expect the manufacturers to make firmware upgrades available, including for the Thomson TG585v8 and Netgear WNR1000v3 routers that we currently supply. From an operating system and device perspective amongst others we have successfully tested Windows 7, Linux, Mac OS X and an iPad 2. We still have a lot of work to do before we will be assigning IPv6 addresses out by default to our customers but today is the first step in getting there. We'll publish more details about our plans over the coming months. We hope today will provide a lot of valuable information to help carry on the next steps and a big thank you goes out to the customers that are helping us with the trial. You can read more about our trial and the feedback and experience of our customers in our forum. Dave Tomlinson Plusnet plc