World IPv6 Day was an event sponsored and organized by the Internet Society and several large content providers to test public IPv6 deployment.[1] It was announced on January 12, 2011 with five anchoring companies: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Akamai Technologies, and Limelight Networks.[2] The event started at 00:00 UTC on June 8, 2011 and ended 23:59 the same day.[3] The main motivation for the event was to evaluate the real world effects of the IPv6 brokenness as seen by various synthetic tests. To this end, during World IPv6 Day major web companies and other industry players enabled IPv6 on their main websites for 24 hours. An additional goal was to motivate organizations across the industry – Internet service providers, hardware makers, operating system vendors and web companies – to prepare their services for IPv6, so as to ensure a successful transition from IPv4 as address space runs out.[4]
The test primarily consisted of websites publishing AAAA records, which allow IPv6 capable hosts to connect using IPv6. Although Internet service providers (ISP) have been encouraged to participate, they were not expected to deploy anything active on that day, just increase their readiness to handle support issues.
Many companies and organizations participated in the experiment, including the largest search engines, social networking websites and internet backbone & content distribution networks.[5]
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There were more than 400 participants[6] included some of the most heavily accessed destinations on the Internet, content distribution networks,[7] as well as various Internet service and infrastructure providers including:[8] Comcast; Google; Yahoo; Facebook; Youtube; Akamai Technologies; Limelight Networks; Microsoft; Vonage; AOL; Mapquest; T-Online; Cisco; Juniper Networks; Huawei; US Department of Commerce; Mastercard; BBC; and Telmex.
Major carriers measured the percentage of IPv6 traffic of all Internet traffic as increasing from 0.024 to 0.041 with respect to native and tunneled stacks combined.[9] The largest increase in traffic in consumer access networks was to Google sites, driven by Android devices.[10] Demonstrating the need for content sites to adopt IPv6 for success, the biggest increase was actually in 6to4 transitional technologies.[10] Early results indicated that the day passed according to plan and without significant problems for the participants.[11]
Cisco and Google reported no significant issues during the test.[12][13] Facebook called the results encouraging, and decided to leave their developer site IPv6-enabled as a result.[14] But the consensus was that more work needed to be done before IPv6 could consistently be applied.[15][16]
The participants will continue to perform detailed analyses of the data. Because most of the Internet infrastructure is already dual stacked,[16] i.e. one for each IPv4 and IPv6, it is not surprising that many participants continue to maintain dual-stacks.[17]