My first Facebook post... over IPv6

So what you might say? Well, it’s some sort of an achievement as it required a combination of a number of small and not so small things: my laptop was using its IPv6 stack, my web browser behaved properly, the local wireless LAN didn’t break it and handed it over to Colt’s network, it went across the Internet which didn’t drop it mysteriously until its final destination which was one of Facebook’s datacenter and the Facebook application which is also natively supporting IPv6.

Where did you do this from might be your next question. The origin isn’t my DSL line at home - as my broadband service provider doesn’t seem to be anywhere close to offer this as a standard feature – which is likely to be related to subpar IPv6 support in many Customer Premises Equipment (CPEs) and the difficulties related to upgrades or new roll-outs. And for many CIOs, IPv6 for internal business systems isn’t a key priority at the moment, as there are many other projects competing for attention and in reality, such an initiative isn’t at the top of the list. While there is no reason to be alarmed if IPv6 internal projects have not commenced, IPv6 shouldn’t be ignored, especially on externally facing platforms. Here’s the truth: I posted this from the v6 World Congress in Paris where Colt has been providing business Internet access allowing attendees to enjoy native, full spectrum, IPv4 and IPv6 connectivity for the last 3 years.

Your next question might be why did it take you so long? It’s true that another year has passed: first there was an April Fool’s, then we had the IPv6 World Day in 2011 followed by the IPv6 Launch Day in 2012 first to raise awareness and then to get as many interested parties to enable IPv6 going forward. While many people expect the Internet to “just work”, if you try to visualize the end-to-end path from my fingers tips typing “This is my first FB post over IPv6 from 2001:920:7000:101:119c:7faa:6c83:a3fa” to the database write operation on Facebook’s infrastructure when I hit “Enter”, there are many pieces of hardware and software involved along the chain that required upgrades and changes to support IPv6!

Finally, it’s clearly not the end of the journey and there’s still much more work to do to tidy things up. For example, two quite complex software components which affect the user experience are the operating system (including smartphone OSes) as well as the web browser. Most use a different approach to select between IPv6 and IPv4 to reach a remote system, which is likely to make the user experience non satisfactory and quite often non-transparent. This will clearly cause pain to many helpdesks trying to sort issues, which might not be easily repeatable. It’s also a way for me to call on our customers (and the IT industry at large) to be more engaged, try to “break” it and help this quite complex “beast” who is still in its infancy to become as predictable, reliable and dependable as the IPv4 Internet. We are getting there, so let’s keep the momentum going!