If the world wide web is going slowly today, it may be due to a worldwide trial of an internet system that will create new IP addresses.
The world ran out of internet addresses earlier this year and it is hoped the trial, which started earlier today, will help solve the problem.
The Internet Society of Australia is coordinating the local end of the new system, known as Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6).
President Tony Hill says it has been a huge undertaking.
This has been a major achievement for the Internet Society worldwide to coordinate the major suppliers of content on the internet and to coordinate efforts by a whole range of people, including ISPs and service providers, and to test this new protocol on the real internet, he said.
He says more than 100 major global companies are participating in world IPv6 day.
Major service providers Google, Facebook and Yahoo have all coordinated to make this the opening day for making their main website available in IPv6 as well as IPv4 at the same time, he said.
Because of the time difference, Australia is one of the first countries to test the technology during business hours.
Mr Hill and others involved in the trial are hoping internet users will not notice the difference.
They expect that perhaps up to 0.05 per cent of users will have a problem because of that change, he said.
We hope not, but we need to test it and see that it's not going to break the functions of the internet which people use every day.
The limited number of internet addresses under the current system has been recognised as a problem since the 1980s.
The internet we use now, IPv4, has a mere 4.3 billion addresses, which ran out in February.
The replacement IPv6 has 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses and it is hoped they will never run out.
Instead of a string of 12 digits, IPv6 uses a combination of 32 letters and numbers, creating many more internet addresses.
Proliferation
The Internet Society of Australia's regional director Rajnesh Singh is in Fiji, which is one of the first countries to trial IPv6 during the day.
He says the new system is vital because of the combination of a growing global population and the proliferation of new devices that connect to the internet.
He says the need is particularly acute in fast growing countries such as India and China.
You could imagine that each person in this country would be on the internet, so just looking at India for example, we'd need 1.2 billion addresses just to cater for every person in India, he said.
Then if we were to look into thinking that each of those persons might have a laptop as well, perhaps a smart phone, that doubles the number immediately.
Mr Singh is monitoring the trial and says, so far, it is all systems go.
Everything looks to be fine. The internet hasn't stopped working, he said.
But as we progress through the time zones and more people come online, we will try and see what impact it has had overall.
