So today, Wednesday 6 June 2012, one year on from the previous World IPv6 Day which was held on Wednesday 8 June 2011,  is officially World IPv6 Launch Day.  Major web sites such as Google, Yahoo, Facebook and others including Akamai, the content distribution network, have permanently switched on their IPv6 support today and, unlike last year, aren’t turning it off this time.  I’ve no idea whether this will have any effect in driving IPv6 adoption, but we can only hope I suppose.

What was more worrying, but probably not surprising, was the large number of inaccurate press reports on the subject.  The BBC News web site seemed to be telling us that IPv6 had only just been invented and switched on, when in fact it’s been around since 1997 in one form or another.  Then there was the usual ‘who needs IPv6, just ignore it’ articles and lots more besides.  It really doesn’t help when the press get it wrong like this!

My biggest disappointment of today was that, although Google had trumpeted how IPv6 compliant it was now, I thought I’d go for the obvious test and send an e-mail from Gmail to my own email address, which sits on an IPv6-enabled server.  And guess what – although you can access Gmail’s web interface over v6, you can’t actually send the mail using v6 – looking at the headers, I was disappointed to see that the mail was delivered to my server over IPv4.  That said, Google Talk (XMPP) is available over IPv6, so that’s good at least.

So, happy World IPv6 Launch day, and the next milestone is going to be RIPE running out of addresses, if the predictions are correct, in about two months’ time.