IPv6 Act Now

Quite a number of articles and blogs including one I contributed [PDF] had IPv6 haruspices dissect the entrails and divine the future of the internet in the wake of the june 8th IPv6 World Day. It came and went with some trepidation, the internet did not go comatose and some marveled at and reported on traffic peaks they witnessed.

Preparation of a keynote [PDF] for the Gogonet Live conference in San Jose, provided me the opportunity to have a look at how some variables evolved since June including the ‘brokenness’ issue, the penetration speed of mobile broadband and its retinue of smart phones and tablets as well as the seemingly insurmountable obstacle of older CPE equipment. A glimpse at the evolution of IPv6 traffic over the intervening semester, at least from the perspective of a global tier-1 wholesale network such as AS6453, would give some quantitative underpinning.

More from CircleID…

The Middle East is set to run out of IPv4 addresses in the first half of 2012, according to Axel Pawlik, managing director of RIPE NCC, one of five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) providing internet resource allocations, registration services and coordination activities for the internet on a global basis.

IPv4 addresses are numeric addresses that identify a computer and allow it to connect to the internet.

“When the computer engineers in the late Seventies started connecting computers to each other, they invented a protocol, and at some point you have to make a design decision of how many numbers are feasible and how long these numbers should be. They decided it should be 32 bits. They thought that that should be plenty of addresses for the next 100 years or so. Now the internet has taken up a big slice of our daily lives. In the late 80s and early 90s we realised that there was going to be an issue because there were too many computers hooked up to the internet and we were about to run out of address blocks,” Pawlik told ITP.net.

More from ITP.net…

Andrews & Arnold (AAISP) has always been at the coal face of broadband, and is leading the charge towards ensuring IPv6 does not get ignored. The free Billion 7800N they provide with new connections is IPv6 capable, but costs the company around £120 to retail.

It appears though that the price of IPv6 capable routers is dropping, with Adrian Kennard hinting that they are close to sourcing a new IPv6 capable router, that is reasonably priced, but still comes with the goodies like DSL and Ethernet WAN ports.

More from Think Broadband…

But it’s going to be slow going, and for good reasons. Despite all IPv6 promises, there is still much, much testing to do before it’s ready for prime time.

Today Comcast revealed that it has started an IPv6 “pilot market deployment” as first step leading to nationwide rollout next year. Broadband providers like Comcast haven’t rushed the switch to IPv6 — despite an increasing shortage of IPv4 network addresses — because of lacking support, ranging from operating systems to network switches and other devices. Then there are security questions that only real-time use can answer.

“This first phase will support certain types of directly connected CPE, where a computer is connected directly to a cable modem”, John Brzozowski, Comcast distinguished engineer & chief architect for IPv6, explains. “This will depend upon the cable modem (a subset of DOCSIS 3.0 cable modems, which will expand over time) and will also depend upon the operating system (only Windows 7, Windows Vista, Mac OS X 10.7 / Lion), which must support stateful DHCPv6″. Comcast’s list of cable modems is 74, but only three support IPv6.

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Part 2 In the previous part I explored why you should limber up to IPv6 sooner rather than later, and now here’s my experience actually walking the talk.

Importantly, mine is not a big-bang approach. I’m not trying to have everything perfect for IPv6 immediately, but rather I want to do just enough to be visible in the brave new world, safely, and tie up loose ends later as I go along.

More from The Register…

By most any measure, the Internet has been wildly successful. From its beginnings over 40 years ago, the Internet has become a globe-spanning infrastructure upon which national economies now depend. However, that very success has led the Internet to a crossroads and the path the Internet takes moving forward will have an impact on how the network continues to grow and its openness to innovation.

To help explain the situation, imagine a city that is growing so rapidly that all the telephone numbers in the city’s single area code are nearly used up.

More from Forbes…

Internet is a network of millions of computers and related devices, which require its own unique address for identification. Unless such recognition can be given, data could not be communicated from one device to another through Internet. Therefore, the technology governing such unique recognition is known as the Internet Protocol (IP) and at present, the most widely used IP is known as IP version 4 (IPv4).

How IPv4 does enable unique addresses?

In certain instances, Internet users come across addresses such as 92.48.255.255 and for a particular device accessing the Internet; it would be its IP address. When communicating through Internet, both the sending device as well as the receiving device should have its own IP or else the ‘IP marked data packets’ do not have the ability to negotiate through the Internet. IPv4 technology enabled more than four billion IP addresses to be assigned and in the beginning, this seems to be more than enough for many decades to come.

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Ultimately IPv6 will do away with the much of the annoyance of NATing, dynamic IP addresses, address rationing, etc, and should make for more efficient and cheaper communications. IPv6 support may soon be necessary to be reachable at all by some users.

IPv6 (or IPng: Next Generation) has been the future of the Internet for a decade and a half, so why the hesitation to get with the programme? It’s probably a case of “if it ain’t broken” and Y2K backlash, but the existing IPv4 address scheme is now broken and Y2K wasn’t a figment of the imagination (I fixed a lot of finance-related bugs around then, trust me).

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