Stephen Shankland – A planned 24-hour test of a network overhaul may wind up slowing your Internet connection to a crawl. The computing industry has begun a major 24-hour test today to work the kinks out of IPv6, a disruptive but necessary overhaul of the Internet’s inner workings. Starting at midnight, Universal Coordinated Time on June 8–or 5 p.m. PT today–dozens of companies lit up servers, Web sites, and network infrastructure that communicate using Internet Protocol version 6. The test, called World IPv6 Day, provides a bit of deadline, albeit one that’s more artificial and less pressing than the Y2K bug’s January 1, 2000, zero hour. Unfortunately, the IPv6 test could disrupt the Net for some people who have badly configured hardware or software, with a Web site taking more than two minutes to load instead of a few seconds. Fortunately, though, the problem probably won’t affect very many people, and the test will help identify any trouble spots. Yahoo estimates 0.05 percent of visitors to its Web site will see very slow response when their computers request IPv6 information that can’t actually be received. That’s a tiny percentage, but multiplied by Yahoo’s huge traffic, it’s still something like 30,000 to 50,000 people a day, said Adam Bechtel, the vice president for Yahoo’s Infrastructure Group, who’s overseeing the company’s IPv6 transition. “It is significant. We have been notifying users,” for example, by adding a notice on the Yahoo home page to notify users if their network connection may be broken, Bechtel said. “We’ve had over a million hits to our IPv6 help page.” What will the network look like for those who are affected? “These users will experience a range of symptoms which could include slow page load times–really slow, like several minutes, not just a little slow,” said Owen DeLong, who runs the professional services division at Hurricane Electric, a back-end Internet service provider that has had a concentrated IPv6 program for years. “In fact, the most common characteristic symptom is that a page element will stall for 90 seconds, then load at normal speed at the end of that pause. In some cases, the pause could be as much as three minutes. Other symptoms could include simply being unable to reach certain Web sites and other intermittent connection issues. “These users should contact their …
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