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"For some of us, it's been 20 years since we began working on next-generation IPNG, which ultimately became IPv6," says Google chief Internet evangelist Vint Cerf, who created a fully dual-stacked IPv4/IPv6 network for the National Science Foundation as long ago as 1995.

Work on the IPv6 project has quickened substantially in recent years, and the success of last year's IPv6 test day proved an encouraging prelude to yesterday's nearly trouble-free endeavor.

Nevertheless, there's still a lot of work to be done, according to Cerf. One of the key advantages of IPv6 is its ability to provide direct point-to-point connectivity, rather than routing everything through central intermediaries.

"A phone call, for example, has the property that when you dial a number, the guy at the other end's phone rings. You don't have to go to a rendezvous point, you don't have to have logged in, you don't have to do any of the things we do today with chat and things like that," he says. "With IPv6, we are going to reinvent the IPv4 system as it was when it was first designed and built, where anybody could initiate a connection to anybody else, as opposed to going through some intermediary or going through a Web ."