An official launch day for IPv6 plans to highlight the fact that the internet is running out of connections and begin the roll out of technology to create trillions of new ones.

ipv6 world launch day logo

Major companies - including AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cisco, D-Link, Facebook, Google, Microsoft Bing and Yahoo - are backing the plan.

The ISPs in that group committed to enabling IPv6 for at least one percent of their residential subscribers from today.

Networking equipment manufacturers have also begun to enable IPv6 by default through their range of home router products.

Meanwhile, web companies participating in the World IPv6 launch have permanently enabled IPv6 on their main websites from today.

"The internet was designed in 1973 and was launched in 1983 and in that time frame we thought it was an experiment. So we allocated address space sort of like telephone numbers sufficient to define 4.3bn termination points," explains Vint Cerf, chief internet evangelist at Google.

"In 1983 that seemed like it would last forever. Remember it was an experiment. The thing is the experiment never ended."

Cerf, who is known as one of the fathers of the internet, says that if all the 5.5bn mobile devices in the world had internet addresses the existing IPv4 address space would be instantly exhausted.

The new system creates 340 trillion, trillion, trillion - or 340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 - addresses.

"We are compelled to implement [IPv6] so we can continue to grow the network," Cerf said.

The World IPv6 Launch Day has been organised by the Internet Society and other participating members include Free Telecom, KDDI, Internode and XS4ALL.

"IPv6 is no longer a lab experiment, it's here and is an important next step in the internet's evolution," said Leslie Daigle, the Internet Society's chief internet technology officer.

"And, as there are more IPv6 services, it becomes increasingly important for companies to accelerate their own deployment plans."

According to the campaign's measurement tool 74.9 per cent of participating websites are reachable in the UK using IPv6.

The launch follows on from the one-day World IPv6 Day event held on 8 June, 2011.

Oddly, participating member Google has not created a special logo on its search page to mark the day and many other members are not displaying the campaign's logos on their websites.

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