Google and
Facebook warn on new system test
By Maija Palmer and Tim Bradshaw
Published: June 8 2011 10:35 | Last updated: June 8 2011 10:35
Google and
Facebook have warned internet users to expect “teething pains” on
Wednesday as leading internet companies test drive a new global
numbering system for cyberspace.
Websites may be slow or hard to
reach as more than 400 of the world largest internet companies,
including Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Facebook, test the new
system.
The switch to a new system – known
as internet protocol version 6 (IPv6) – is essential because
internet addresses on the current system are about to run out.
The last of the addresses
were allocated in February. In order to accommodate the millions of
people coming on to the internet in emerging markets and the new
mobile phones and tablet devices needing online connections, the
number of addresses has to be increased.
Much as telephone numbers have
gone from a couple of digits in the early days of telephony to
strings of 10 or 11 numbers today, the internet will move from 32
bit addresses to 128 bit addresses. This will allow 4bn times more
internet identifiers to be created than exist today.
However, compatibility between the
two numbering systems is far from straightforward. A home computer
connecting via IPv4 will not be able to connect to a website
running on IPv6. Experts warn that if the two systems are not
connected, millions of people in fast-growing internet markets such
as China and India could struggle to access websites in the US and
Europe, and vice-versa.
When Heise Online, one of
Germany’s biggest news sites, experimented with putting its pages
on IPv6 last year, some users were unable to access the site.
People using older versions of internet browsers and the Mac
operating system struggled to load up the pages, although Heise
concluded that the number of problems was “smaller than previously
feared”.
A larger-scale test will run on
Wednesday, with hundreds of companies participating in World IPv6
Day, billed by the Internet
Society as the first “test flight” to prepare for IPv4
exhaustion and accelerate the momentum of IPv6 deployment.
Participants include the world’s
biggest websites as well as Akamai, Cisco, Huawei and Limelight,
who provide technology and infrastructure in the internet’s
backbone.
“The vast majority (99.95 per
cent) of people will be able to access services without
interruption,” Google
said in a blogpost on Monday evening.
“However, as with any
next-generation technology, there may be teething pains. We
estimate that 0.05 per cent of systems may fail to fall back to
IPv4, so some people may find Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Bing and
other participating websites slow or unresponsive on World IPv6
Day.”
Users of older web browsers or
“misconfigured” home networking equipment could find that they have
difficulty accessing many sites.
“Since the best way to find bugs
in your services is to hammer on them yourself, Google employees
have been operating in “World IPv6 Day mode” for several months
now,” Google said.
“IPv6 is used extensively in many
large networks, but has never been enabled at a global scale,” said
Facebook in its blogpost on the test. “World IPv6 Day will allow us
to better understand how our infrastructure and code perform under
IPv6 while minimising impact on our users.”
Google has been among the most
active proponents of migration to IPv6. Vint Cerf, one of the
internet’s founding fathers and now Google’s chief internet
evangelist, warned last November that online growth
could be threatened if it is not implemented.
Google will be moving its search,
e-mail and YouTube video services over to IPv6 for the day on
Wednesday, starting from early morning in Asia.
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