The Internet's biggest players -- including Facebook, Google, Yahooand Bing -- are turning on IPv6 today as part of the World IPv6 Launch Day challenge coordinated by the Internet Society. But which websitesare not ready to support the next-gen Internet Protocol? Well, Twitter , for one. When asked about the real-time information sharingsite's progress on IPv6 and why the company isn't participating inWorld IPv6 Launch Day, Twitter spokesman Robert Weeks said:"Twitter is looking to enable IPv6 as soon as we can." In themeantime, there is no IPv6-based access for Twitter, which has morethan 100 million active users. Other high-profile sites that aren't among the 3,000 participantsin World IPv6 Launch Day are business-oriented social networkingsite LinkedIn , e-commerce giants Amazon and eBay , online reference Wikipedia , and classified advertising service Craigslist . Neither Tumblr nor Pinterest -- two popular image-sharing websites --- is participating inWorld IPv6 Launch Day. Nor is PayPal. SLIDESHOW: Why the Internet needs IPv6 Indeed, of Alexa's Top 50 most popular websites in the UnitedStates, only 12 -- or 24% -- are listed as participants in World IPv6 Launch Day. That means 76% of the 50 most popular U.S. websites aren't readyfor IPv6 traffic. "As far as the laggards are concerned, if they are not activelyworking on IPv6 then the only progress they are making is to makethemselves irrelevant," said Owen DeLong, IPv6 evangelist anddirector of professional services at Hurricane Electric , a leading IPv6 service provider. "I understand that there are naysayers out there, but as of thesixth of June, IPv6 will be deployed," said Leslie Daigle, chiefInternet technology officer at the Internet Society. "With 50participating network access providers enabling IPv6 for 1% oftheir subscribers on June 6, that will be a big enough percentageof Internet traffic to catch the attention of businessdecision-makers." World IPv6 Launch Day is a voluntary event designed to bring momentum to IPv6, thelong-anticipated upgrade to the Internet's main communicationsprotocol, which is called IPv4. IPv6 is needed because the Internetis running out of addresses with IPv4. Asia ran out of unassignedIPv4 addresses last year, Europe is expected to deplete its supplythis summer, and North America's will expire next year. BACKGROUND: Rehearsals over, IPv6 goes prime time June 6 IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses and can support 4.3 billion devicesconnected directly to the Internet. IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses andcan connect up a virtually unlimited number of devices: 2 to the128th power. Deployment of IPv6 has been hampered by the fact thatit is not backward compatible with IPv4. So network operators musteither deploy both protocols in what's called dual-stack mode ortranslate between them, which adds latency and cost. Internet policymakers have been trying to drum up support for IPv6with events like World IPv6 Launch Day, which has been successfulin raising the visibility of IPv6. But there's no question thatencouraging U.S. companies to deploy IPv6 remains an uphill battle. "With World IPv6 Launch Day on June 6, organizations have got tomake sure they have IPv6 plans or they are not selling completeInternet services," said John Curran, president and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers , which provides IPv4 and IPv6 addresses to U.S. network operators."On June 6, ISPs are turning it on and leaving it on permanently.This is the day that the Internet is now dual-stack, IPv4 andIPv6." U.S. corporations that aren't participating in World IPv6 LaunchDay include publishers such as The Huffington Post and The New York Times and broadcasters such as CNN, ESPN and Fox News . Among entertainment companies, neither Hulu nor Disney is participating. Bank of America, Wells Fargo andChase Bank aren't signed up, and neither is Walmart or the Weather Channel. Even the leading online porn sites -- LiveJasmin and PornHub --appear to be IPv6-free for now. "There are definitely people living in denial about theinevitability of IPv6," DeLong said. DeLong added that many big-name websites are working on IPv6behind-the-scenes even though they didn't want to publicly committo supporting IPv6 by June 6, the World IPv6 Launch Day deadline.For example, Amazon in May announced expanded IPv6 support for its Elastic Load Balancer. "Amazon'snetworking group is putting some effort into making its servicesIPv6 capable even if Amazon.com isn't ready yet," DeLong said. Similarly, Apple is making improvements in its IPv6 support in OS X Lion but isn't yet supporting the new protocol on its popular Apple.comwebsite or its iTunes or App Store services. "Apple is running IPv6internally throughout its internal corporate engineering network,"DeLong said. IPv6 proponents are hoping that a successful World IPv6 Launch Daywill encourage Apple, Amazon and other laggards to ramp up theirIPv6-related efforts. "There aren't as many IPv4 addresses as there are people on theplanet," Daigle points out. "More and more companies are waking upto that fact and wondering how they are expected to cope with IPv4in terms of buying IPv4 addresses or installing increasinglycomplex network address translators or deploying IPv6." MORE: Sales of unused IPv4 addresses gathering steam DeLong said there's no doubt that IPv6 will become increasinglyimportant for website operators to support. "We've seen a 5X to 6Xincrease in IPv6 traffic in the last week on our own backbonenetwork," DeLong said, pointing out that Hurricane Electric has theInternet's most interconnected IPv6 backbone. "The IPv6 traffic isonly going to go up from here." World IPv6 Launch Day "is probably the first time we're going tosee the amount of IPv6 traffic go up significantly and stay thatway," agreed Bob Hinden, a Check Point fellow and one of thedevelopers of IPv6 at the Internet Engineering Task Force. "I thinkwe'll see it spike as more content is turned on." Read more about lan and wan in Network World's LAN & WAN section. We are high quality suppliers, our products such as Whole House Water Purifier Manufacturer , China Magnetic Water Filtration for oversee buyer. To know more, please visits Whole House Water Purifier.
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