IPv6 Act Now

This is an extended commentary on a presentation to the 1st Workshop on Internet Economics, hosted by CAIDA in September 2009.

The Fine Print: I am not a economist in terms of my professional qualifications. Worse still, I think I fit in to the category of amateur economic dilettante! So most of what I offer here I do so tentatively, as it probably needs a little more rigor and precision in basic economic terms than I am able to provide!

At the outset I should say that here I would like to restrict my view to the transition from the IPv4 Internet to the IPv6 Internet, and, in particular, to examine the topic of the appropriate market structure that lies behind the dual stack transition strategy, and the manner in which the Internet can transition from the universal use of IPv4 as the underlying datagram protocol to the universal use of IPv6. I should also stress that this is not an examination of IPv6 itself and its utility, but is limited to an examination of the mechanisms of transition from the IPv4 Internet to the IPv6 Internet, using an approach that attempts to take a perspective of the fundamentals of markets and the associated market models that attempt to bring suppliers and consumers into some form of equilibration.

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It’s fascinating what does and doesn’t generate discussion among us geeks. Still, we were pleasantly surprised by both the amount of discussion and continued wide range of opinions that our posing the question of the business case for IPv6 brought about. And since some of you may not have visited the discussion pages for the prior two newsletters and continued discussion at the Webtorials Water Cooler, this week’s newsletters will summarize some of the comments.

We’ll start with the comments that were in favor of IPv6. One of the first people to comment stated flatly that “I will NEVER buy another router that doesn’t support IPv6. One more [garden variety home router]? No thank you! These guys are already losing my business…” This was countered by a statement that many home routers already support IPv6.

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The running out of IPv4 address and the need to adopt IPv6 is being addressed around the world, although with not enough urgency. Sweden is in the same position as other countries, and the registry for .SE domain names, .SE, has found that neither the Swedish internet industry nor its business or public sector customers have done much to prepare for the transition to IPv6. This is evident in three recent surveys concerning supply and demand of IPv6 services.

As the number of available IPv4 addresses decline and the prediction that they will run out by 2012, it is becoming more and more important that business adopts IPv6.

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On October 29th, the Internet will turn 40 years old. Marking this occasion, IEEE has held an international event in Los Angeles, USA to mark its own 125th anniversary and the upcoming birthday of the former ARPAnet project, currently referred to as the Internet. At this event many renowned scientists and Internet experts spoke on today’s main Internet-related topics.

One of those invited at this special event was Vinton Cerf, worldwide famous scientist who practically built the Internet with his hands. The co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocol suite, ARPAnet lead scientist and ICANN founder, Mr. Cerf has been recently involved with the Internet Engineering Task Force on the IPv6 protocol and with Google as Vice President and Internet Evangelist.

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Fahad AlSharawi is Managing Director of 2Connect in Bahrain and a member of the RIPE NCC Executive Board. In the latest video testimonial on IPv6 Act Now, he discusses some of the obstacles still faced in IPv6 deployment.

View more IPv6 testimonial videos, including discussions with Google, the Internet Society (ISOC) and Hurricane Electric.

Businesses should be getting more familiar with IP Version 6 right now, to be prepared when the current protocol, IPv4, runs out of available addresses — something now likely to happen in 2012, the head of a regional Internet registry said today.

John Curran, president and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers, the group responsible for the technical coordination and management of Internet number resources in the U.S. and Canada, said much of the enterprise hardware and software deployed today is IPv6-ready, but there are processes and procedures that must be implemented to make the conversion. Doing so now rather than later will enable businesses to avoid some of the performance problems experienced when linking IPv4 and IPv6 traffic through network address translation (NAT) boxes, Curran said.

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Internet pioneer Vinton Cerf repeated a call Wednesday evening for migrations to IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) to stave off an anticipated lack of available addresses on IPv4.

Speaking at an industry event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., Cerf, co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols, warned that IPv4 will run out of addresses next year or in early 2011. While there will be a period of attempts to sell off IPv4 spaces, Cerf stressed that the “smart thing to do is implement v6 now.” He has made similar calls for migration to IPv6 previously.

More from InfoWorld…

Think IPv6 is so 2008? Think again. All agencies met the Office of Management and Budget’s June 2008 deadline to demonstrate their ability to carry IPv6 traffic across their backbone networks, but that doesn’t mean the federal government is ready for the next-generation Internet.

For the past year, agencies have been worrying about other network-centric issues, such as securing their Internet connections and domain name services against hackers, selecting new carriers through the Networx program, and doling out smart cards to employees and contractors. But thanks to new guidance from the federal Chief Information Officers Council, IPv6 is back in the spotlight.

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Government is keen to promote Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), by replacing Internet Protocol version 4(IPv4), said D K Agarwal, Advisor (Technology), Department of Telecommunication, New Delhi.IPv4 is the most popular Internet protocol platform used in the world. A protocol is a set of rules used by computers to communicate with each other across a network.IPv6 is the next generation protocol, already in use across the world.

More from Express Buzz…

The national commission in charge for the migration towards Internet Protocol Version IPV6 held its first meeting on September 13, 2009 in Tunis.

IPV6 is the  ”next generation” protocol designed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to replace the current Internet Protocol version (”IPv4″).

The new  Internet Layer Protocol for packed-switched internetworks, is endowed with a larger address space (128-bits) than IPv4 (32 bits). The new protocol will  provide the country  with sufficient capacity to  host Internet addresses and meet growing  internet needs.

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