Last Night IPv6 Went Live On the Backbone of the Internet!

Ta-da! IPv6 is here!

IPv6 Day: Only the Biggest Change to the Internet Since Its Inception

It’s only the most significant architectural development in the history of the Internet, and presto, it transpired last night at 00:01 GMT. Did you notice?

I’m betting not, and that you probably didn’t even know it was happening, which is precisely how things were supposed to go down. Don’t worry, you’re fine, you don’t need to do anything, and as far as most of the Internet is concerned, turning on IPv6 — of tectonic caliber at the architectural level, minus the earthquakes — won’t impact how you interact with the Internet any time soon. But it will eventually. And it was necessary, to prevent the Internet from running out of real estate.

Thus ‘IPv6 Day,’ which is what participants have dubbed June 6, 2012, the day some of the world’s biggest Internet service providers like AT&T, Cisco, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and TIME’s own parent company, Time Warner, enable IPv6 permanently on their hardware. It’s the followup to World IPv6 Day, which occurred a year ago on June 8, 2011, when providers turned on IPv6 for a single day in a kind of symbolic ‘time to pay attention to this’ act.”

With IPv6, everything can have a unique address. In comparison to IPv4’s 4.3 billion IP addresses, IPv6 can assign about 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses. Or to be exact:
340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 IP addresses.