IPv6

Taken together, these 9 perceptions suggest a growing appetite for transfers of increasingly scarce IPv4 addresses.

The IPv6 Forum on Tuesday presented a special award to four U.S. government officials for their pioneering work in promoting IPv6, an emerging upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol.

Akamai Technologies will announce on Tuesday a new service for improving website performance that determines the type of device and network a user has -- and whether the device has an IPv4 or IPv6 address -- and then improves the delivery of Web content accordingly.

With the worldwide supply of IPv4 addresses rapidly dwindling, the United States is pulling ahead of its global rivals in the deployment of next-generation Internet services based on the emerging IPv6 standard.

U.S. ISPs are reporting a significant rise in IPv6 traffic during the last three months, even though the overall numbers remain tiny -- less than 1% of Internet traffic.

The IPv6 movement has been years in the making. So many years, in fact, that it has hardly been a movement at all. While a handful of regions, primarily in Asia and pockets of Europe, have embraced IPv6, it has been otherwise largely ignored, something to be considered later while we exhaust IPv4 assets. This thinking has clearly stunted the growth of IPv6, presenting opportunities to early adopters and IPv6 facilitators and indigestion for the procrastinators.

Despite widespread publicity for World IPv6 Launch day earlier this week, the protocol’s presence on the Internet remains painfully modest next to the domination of IPv4, Internet monitoring companies have reported.

The much-hyped World IPv6 Launch Day event on Wednesday resulted in a rise in IPv6 traffic -- including Web and email -- to a new peak as expected. But ISPs said the bigger story was the steady increase in IPv6 traffic that occurred in the months leading up to the event, which they anticipate will continue for the rest of 2012.

Today is the day IPv6 finally goes live. For as long as there has been an Internet IPv4 has been synonymous with IP and nobody really stopped to think about which version of the protocol it was. But, IPv4 has outlived its usefulness.

The Internet's biggest players -- including Facebook, Google, Yahoo and Bing -- are turning on IPv6 today as part of the World IPv6 Launch Day challenge coordinated by the Internet Society. But which websites are not ready to support the next-gen Internet Protocol?

As the operator of some of the core Internet name servers, including the DNS root, .com and .net, Verisign has a unique view into the challenges of transitioning to IPv6 and progress to date.

A growing number of U.S. carriers and enterprises are hedging their bets on IPv6 by purchasing blocks of unused IPv4 addresses through official channels or behind-the-scenes dealmaking.