• Happy birthday IPv6 – IPv6 turns 20 years old!

    by  • 30th November 2015 • newsfeed

    I read this new thing recently, and I liked it

    Happy birthday IPv6 – IPv6 turns 20 years old!

    The ‘Internet Protocol, Version 6 (IPv6) Specification’ codified in RFC1883 is from the 1st of December 1995, which is now already 20 years ago.
    RFC1883 was the first formal specification of the 6th version of an Internet Protocol.
    This thus makes IPv6 20 years old and ready to drink as any other well aged whisky.
    With another milestone year around the corner: two-thousand-IPv6-teen we hopefully will be seeing mass IPv6 deployment at every ISP in the world.

    If your ISP does not have IPv6 today, and does not have a plan to get native IPv6 to your doorstep in the next few months, we can only suggest to jump ship and find a new ISP as they have been slacking behind for a decade already where RIR address space has been available.
    Two full decades if you include the good old 6bone times where lots of people around the world where experimenting with IPv6 already.

    To push IPv6 over the edge at ISPs who have not seen the light yet, we’ll be making a harsh move: January 2016 will be Call-Your-ISP-for-IPv6 month.
    We are asking every person who does not have native IPv6 yet to call their ISP and demand IPv6.

    To further this goal SixXS will stop accepting new account registrations, tunnel and subnet requests per X-mas (24th of December) 2015.
    We’ll resume signups, tunnel and subnet requests again in the run of February 2016.
    This will give everybody who gets an IPv6 enabled toy over X-mas the time to call their ISP and ask where their native IPv6 is and when they will be getting it.

    Of course, don’t only call up the ISPs for native IPv6 connectivity, also call up the companies who produce your toys and whom do not support IPv6 yet.

    Hopefully this will give a little extra incentive to the ISPs who have made no New Years plans yet, to put on that list, to finally think about IPv6.
    Two decades of planning should be enough warning time for them to realize that the time is ripe and IPv6 really turned into a young lady already and is not a kid anymore.

    2016 will also be the year that SixXS will have existed and operating for 15 years.
    We’ll have a done a long 16 years of operating IPv6 Tunnel Brokers for free and fun by then, including the predecessor IPv6 Tunnel Broker IPng.nl that started in the year 2000.

    At one point though SixXS will want to close the doors as running the system is a very time consuming thing, and while we started this out in our late student years combining it with real work and family makes time very tight to provide this service for free for the 45k of active users.
    Hence, make your ISP support native IPv6, even if you have an account already and have been enjoying this service for a long time.

    We’ll be repeating the Call-Your-ISP-For-IPv6 actions through out 2016.

    Hopefully you will be calling your ISPs enough that their callcenters will have IPv6 requests as the most common problem being called about.

    Note that a call is a few moments of your time, but a huge burden on the ISP as it reflects badly in their statistics and that will be visible on the CEO level quickly, thus might actually make them finally do something about IPv6.

    We wish everybody good luck in arranging native IPv6!

    Please also support IPv6 For Refugees who donate 10 Swedish SEK for the large refugee catastrophe for every unique IPv6 address visiting their page.