IPv6 on Youtube!
Google has started to use IPv6 on YouTube and this news has not gone unnoticed, as it has generated considerable peaks IPv6 traffic across the Net “On Thursday we saw a tremendous increase in traffic from Google,” said Martin Levy, Director of IPv6 Strategy at Hurricane Electric, an ISP that operates one of the IPv6 backbone worldwide. The spike in traffic was 30 times higher than that previously generated by the Google datacenters.
The fact that the IPv6 protocol has been adopted from YouTube is an important sign of the much anticipated replacement of the previous protocol, known as IPv4. An increasing number of sites are adding support for IPv6, since the old IPv4 is running out the number of available IP addresses.
IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses and can support a maximum of about 4.3 billion addresses. IPv6 uses a 128-bit format can instead reach a staggering 2128. Experts predict that IPv4 addresses will be exhausted in 2012 (assuming that will not end the world;)). Although it seems that in January 2010 less than 10% of IPv4 addresses be available.
Google already supports IPv6 on its services such as research, Alerts, Docs, Finance, Gmail, Health, iGoogle, News, Reader, Picasa, Maps, Wave, Chrome and Android products. Google engineers have also stated that the implementation of IPv6 has been less problematic and costly than you think.
