Watch carefully when you turn your computer tomorrow. If everything goes according to plan, you won’t notice a thing, even though large parts of the Internet will be going through a test run for its next stage: Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), a new system to ensure that the web doesn’t run out of addresses.

On June 8, search and content giants including Google, Facebook, and Yahoo! will make their websites available over the new system – while your hardware and browser need to be able to set up to view them as well, it’s effectively the largest test yet of the new set of standards.

“Content providers are really keen to make sure their services are available very widely for end-users and distributed globally,” Mat Ford, the Internet Society’s technology program manager told Real Time Brussels on the phone from Edinburgh. This is worth doing now, because “the consequence of IPv4 running out of address space, is that services become very brittle and hard to debug when things go wrong.”

The concept is explained in this article – put simply, it’s like when telephone companies run out of numbers and have to add an extra digit in order to extend the network. The internet grew faster than anyone could have predicted and if the switchover isn’t made to IPv6, services will become increasingly disrupted as the system creaks under the weight of billions of new users from emerging countries joining the current masses online. That’s where the content providers come in, according to Mr. Ford.

“It’s a chicken and egg situation: for years you’d hear content providers saying there were no users with IPv6 access, while internet service providers said, there’s no content. IpV6 Day is about trying to change that cycle: we’re going to kill the chicken and break the egg.”

via Test Driving a New Internet Starts Wednesday – Real Time Brussels – WSJ.