The Internet Society of Australia (ISOC-AU) has called on local businesses ISPs to participate in World IPv6 Day, with Internode the first major Aussie telco to sign up to the initiative.
ISOC-AU vice president, Narelle Clark, told Computerworld Australia the organisation was looking for the participation of everyone from government departments, media companies, healthcare providers, education institutions, and internet service providers.
“We're asking that the content and service providers open their 'front doors' to IPv6,” Clark said. “Enable their server infrastructure, either on a permanent or temporary basis, put an IPv6 AAAA record into their name servers (DNS), let us know they're participating, and keep an eye on things during the day, we have lined up some partners to assist if they cannot do it themselves.”
According to Clark, participants should inform ISOC-AU of their technical contacts and conduct some measurement and monitoring on the day.
“They don't have to go public, either, but if they let us know they are in on the test day, then we can turn the measurement programs their way, and let them know what we see in terms of global reach.
“If they are a hosting provider, then letting their customers know how to add the IPv6 AAAA records to their services would be advisable, but it is up to the service providers to determine how they wish to communicate with their customers.”
Clark also noted ISPs may want to put up special instructions for customers, or have a specialist on standby on the day depending on their business.
The aim of the initiative is to collaboratively to make services available to everyone, Clark said, and to bring the technology into play in a co-operative way.
“We want to continue to enable the Internet infrastructure of the future, and that means eventually connecting many many times the number of devices we have connected to the Internet today which cannot be done using IPv4.
“The majority of ISPs have been planning their migration to IPv6 for a number of years, and will have good plans in place already. In this way, they can test their own readiness at the same time as the major content providers: Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Akamai and many others across the world,” she said.
While ISOC-AU expects significant increases in traffic world wide over IPv6, Clark said the organisation was still expecting the unexpected, noting cases of older browsers timing out when they don't find an IPv6 path to an IPv6 address and sometimes not falling back to the IPv4 one.
“There may be additional calls to ISP help desks with people wanting to participate natively, but not being able to.”
World IPv6 Day runs from 10am AEST (Australian Eastern Standard Time) to 11:59am WA time 9 June
“On the whole, it is likely that the vast majority of Internet users won't even notice - but those on IPv6 networks will see a lot more in the way of services.”
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