Facebook, Google and Akamai are among some 200 companies that will be switching to IPv6 during the World IPv6 day trial on June 8. The test which is intended to see how well prepared technology companies are to handle IPv6 addresses as well as what to expect when Websites are obliged to enable IPv6 in the future will be on for 24 hours, a report in pcworld.com stated.

Despite humongous investments of time and money that the major companies are making for the World IPv6 Day trial, it will hardly make any difference to smaller businesses. In fact, the Internet Society (ISOC) estimates that 99.95 percent of all users worldwide will not even notice anything at all this Wednesday, according to the report.

Unless, a business is hosting its own Web servers, it has nothing to prepare for when the IPv4 addresses are expected to be depleted.

The recently produced routers already support IPv6. Also, Windows XP, Vista, 7, and upcoming Windows 8, as well as major Linux distributions including Red Hat and Ubuntu, are IPv6-ready. But even if a network equipment or Operating System does not support IPv6, you will still not notice anything on June 8, or in the future. Small businesses can also continue using IPv4 addresses indefinitely since it will not be in the interest of a Website owner to lock anyone out who continues to use an IPv4 connection. Since IPv6 addresses are incompatible with IPv4 addresses, and vice-versa, it will be necessary to support IPv4 until there are no users left that use the protocol, pcworld.com stated.

When one starts seeing IPv6 addressees show up in the future, the first thing to notice will be the length of their addressable space. The ISOC offers this address as an example: 2001:db8:1f70:999:de8:7648:6e8.

Without going into the nitty-gritty about security, you will no longer have to worry about NAT devices with IPv6 if you make the switch. IPsec is mandated as well, which is only optional in IPv4 and offers an extra element of security.

The key difference is that the longer spaces that IPv6 offers means that trillions and trillions of the addresses will be available in the future. It is thus safe to say that IPv6 addresses will be available beyond your grandchildren's lifetimes, when none of this will matter anyway, the report stated.

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