World IPv6 launched today (6 June 2012)

Today (6 June 2012) is the world launching day for IPv6.

To recap, I wrote about the exhaustion of IPv4 last year. The address space used by the current version of the Internet protocol, IPv4, has already run out. Without action, we risk increased costs and limited functionality online for Internet users everywhere, in addition to curtailing the Internet’s growth of a platform for innovation and economic development. The only long-term solution to this problem is adoption of IPv6, which provides a practically unlimited number of addresses.

Now, major Internet service providers (ISPs), home networking equipment manufacturers, and web companies around the world are finally coming together to permanently enable IPv6 for their products and services by today (6 June 2012).

This marks the largest industry commitment to and deployment of IPv6 in the history of the Internet, with the ultimate aim to eventually replace the current IPv4.

Well, due to its vast usage and long time existance, IPv4 won't be replaced within a few years, and will co-exist with the new IPv6 for a lengthy transition period.

Meanwhile, for end users like you and me, whether it is IPv4 or IPv6 should be pretty transparent to us, as we are more adopted to the more human-readable domain names translated from the IP addresses.