There will be a worldwide test of IPv6 on 6 June 2012, sponsored by the Internet Society.

On that day, the main Internet industry companies will activate IPv6 on all their web sites for 24 hours. The purpose is to motivate other sector organisations, from Internet providers, hardware and software manufacturers to web companies, to do the same in order to accelerate the transition and ensure its success. The fact that the main Internet companies will implement IPv6 implies a strong incentive for the rest, thereby speeding up the process and reducing the global cost.

This transition is becoming urgent because the last available blocks of IPv4 addresses were assigned in 2011. If this process is not undertaken now, the costs of Internet management will significantly increase, functionality for a large number of users all over the world will be limited and the development of new applications and services, especially those of the 'Internet of things, will be slowed down.

The exponential growth of the Internet has consumed the address space originally planned by its designers. IPv4 allows 4,294,967,296 addresses (32 bits), although taking into account the assignment schemes of address blocks, the effective number of addresses is only some hundreds of millions. IPv6 manages 128 bit addresses, which allows 340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 different public addresses. This number is so large that it seems impossible for it to be used up, but remember that the objective is to allow any electronic device to be present on the Internet.

RedIRIS has produced a schedule, reflecting the most important RedIRIS milestones in relation to IPv6 and providing information about the support for deploying this protocol.

RedIRIS wishes to join the World IPv6 Launch Day initiative because we consider it important to encourage all affiliated institutions to draw up their strategic plans to include migration to IPv6 in all their networks and not only in those in the narrow scope of telematic research.

Specifically, we consider this to be a good time to start offering major services over IPv6, operating in parallel with the classic IPv4, in what is called the 'Dual Stack Model. RedIRIS therefore recommends following the indications in Guide to IPv6 deployment .

In any case, an important aspect of the event programmed for 8 June is to have the opportunity to study the effect that an experiment of this scale can have on the network and on users. RedIRIS has implemented several tools to observe how many of the parameters will change over the next few months, all grouped around an IPv6 Control Panel.

In addition to analysing the effects of the experiment on the RedIRIS community, information about the status of IPv6 can be found in the IPv6 Observatory .