World IPv6 Day, a test spanning 24 hours through which over 400 major web companies severed content via IPv6, was held exactly one month ago. It was lead by Yahoo, Google, VMware and other major players to encourage smaller service providers to switch to IPv6, and it seems that this effort proved itself to be successful. ZDNet Asia reports that 1.2 percent of the top million sites ranked by Alexa moved to the protocol, compared to only 0.5 percent before the event. The vast majority of service providers, however, have not yet made the switch. Joe Yeager, Lanscope’s dev head, thinks that they better start preparing:

“All organizations need to at least be developing strategies around when and how they will make the leap to IPv6. Overall, this is a classic case of “prepare now or scramble later,” and ‘later’ is coming sooner than most people realize.”

Many companies are following this trend, though some are resorting to other, far less efficient means of handling the shrinking number of IPv4s. Large Scale NAT (LSN) is one approach – assigning one IP to thousands of users. Only a very limited number of ISPs uses LSN, and larger adoption is an issue due to the enormous difficulties it would create around security and targeting. IPv6 in comparison eliminates the need for NAT all together.

According to Truman Boyes, Juniper Networks’ Asia-Pacific senior professional services manager, some of the telecoms and ISPs in the region are among the many others that are beginning to realize this. Many of these organizations systems’ are running a duel-stack that allows both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic.

In turn, the switch to the new protocol also involves challenges from the user end. In a keynote, Yahoo’s Ian Flint said only a relatively small portion of internet users have systems capable of supporting IPv6, and out of those, one of ten has a broken connection. This is where the problem emerges, because it normally takes up to several minutes for the major operating systems to fall back to IPv4.

Citrix and Microsoft are also looking closely at the IPv6. In a interview with SiliconANGLE,  Greg Smith, Senior Director, cloud and networking product group at Citrix told our news editor Kristen Nicole that the shift may cause the creation of two internets. That means that at least for now IPv4s still have some value, which is why Microsoft acquired $7 million worth from Nortel Networks.