On Wednesday, Google announced the world IPv6 day: on June 8, 2011, several major Internet companies including Google, Facebook, and Yahoo! will enable IPv6 on their main websites. The test will probably only last 24 hours, and the results will be carefully analyzed before turning IPv6 on forever on those sites.

Google already provides IPv6 services. However, only selected candidate networks or motivated hackers have access to those services. The rest of the world only see the IPv4 version.

The word about the June 8 experiment has been spread by lots of IPv6 enthusiasts and activists on social networks. However, looking at their Twitter profile, it is hard not to notice that most of their personal or professional web sites are definitely IPv4-only. While one can understand why the most visited web sites need to be careful in their systematic enabling of IPv6, smaller sites do not take huge risks in enabling IPv6 by default today.

If you want IPv6 to become a reality tomorrow, start using it today by enabling IPv6 on your own web server, and publish its IPv6 address in your DNS alongside with the IPv4 one. Do it before Google does it. Beat Facebook to it. Sure, a minuscule portion of your visitors may experience occasional difficulties. So what? This is a good occasion for them to iron those problems out. Did you even check that your provider gives you IPv6 addresses already? If you did, this is a first step, do the second one and use those addresses. If you didn’t, talk to your provider now, all it takes is a short email requesting a status update about IPv6.

And if you want to test whether, as an information consumer, you are ready to browse IPv6-only sites as they appear, do not hesitate to use this excellent tool.

Will 2011 be the year of IPv6?