IPv6 Act Now

Much of our current thinking about networking for physical security systems lags behind the advances of technology. Because advancements come more rapidly every year, it is no longer sufficient to base our thinking on “the latest technology.”

We have to take technology trends into account if we wish to deploy systems that will have useful lives of 5 to 10 years, and which can use and be used by new technology as it arrives in the coming decade.

In the late 1990s, there was much activity in the Internet standards community. The dot-com boom was rolling, use of the Internet was expanding, and commerce-based cryptography and security standards were just being developed. Many network protocols were devised, refined and/or standardized during this time. Among these was IPv6, the solution to IPv4 address limitation as well as a logical evolution of the Internet for many reasons.

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IPv4 is the most commonly used Internet layer protocol and at the writing of this article is used by the vast majority of devices connected to the Internet.

There are over four billion possible IPv4 addresses that can be used.  However due to the increase in usages of smartphones, laptops and tablets, theses addresses are running out quickly.

Earlier in the year the IANA announced that “The future of the Internet is in IPv6. All Internet stakeholders must now take definitive action to deploy IPv6.” This is due to the last IPv4 addresses having been allocated.  At Evolving Networks we believe that in 2012, the switch over from IPv4 to IPv6 will begin to gather serious momentum.

So what is IPv6 and how is it different to its predecessor?

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Comcast continues to extend its leadership role in the adoption of next-generation Internet services with the news that it has expanded its production IPv6 deployment into four more states — Illinois, Florida, Pennsylvania and New Jersey — over the past six weeks.

Comcast made the announcement here yesterday at a technical seminar sponsored by Network World called “The Critical Path to IPv6.”

Comcast launched its production IPv6 deployment on Oct. 31 in the East Bay area of San Francisco with 100 customers. Now Comcast says it has more than 1,000 users of IPv6 nationwide.

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In 2011, the increasingly mobile and socially networked world of technology became more intertwined than ever with politics and the law. Patent wars shaped competition in tablets and smartphones, hacktivists attacked a widening array of political and corporate targets, repressive regimes unplugged citizens from the Internet, and the U.S. government moved to block the giant merger of AT&T and T-Mobile USA. With the passing of Steve Jobs, the world lost a technology icon who redefined the computer, entertainment and consumer electronics industries. These are the IDG News Service’s picks for the top 10 technology stories of the year:

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Never let it be said “The Inquirer” doesn’t know how to grab attention: “The Internet is doomed until European businesses and organizations begin to move towards IPv6.”

That’s their quote from Neelie Kroes, vice president of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda. Rather nicely frames the importance of the issue, doesn’t it?

At the recently German IPv6 summit, in addition to that dire pronouncement, Kroes also said Europeans are “starting to see close ahead of us the consequences if we don’t make the switch to IPv6.”

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We are at the dawn of the age of IPv6, the Internet protocol that will succeed version 4. With 340 undecillion available addresses, IPv6 ensures that the Internet can continue growing and offers advantages in terms of stability, flexibility, and simplicity in network administration.

The Internet is a communications network formed by millions of interconnected computers that share data and resources. All the computers on the network use the Internet protocol (IP) so that users can read a web page or send an e-mail and be sure that information is properly sent and received. The protocol assigns a numeric code (IP address) to each device on the network in order to identify it. In other words, “the IP protocol is the universal language that allows all the devices connected to the Internet to understand each other,” says Xavier Hesselbach, a member of the research group on Design and Evaluation of Broadband Networks and Services.

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The University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL) hosted its third IPv6 Customer Edge (CE) Router Interoperability Test Event the week of November 7-11, 2011. The event brought together users and suppliers of CE Router equipment in order to gain perspective on the current status of interoperability against the Internet Engineering Task Force’s (IETF) Basic Requirements for IPv6 Customer Edge Routers (document draft-ietf-v6ops-6204bis-02).

During the IPv6 CE Router event the UNH-IOL used publically routable IPv6 addresses, allowing participants to connect to the global IPv6 Internet. The eight participating vendor companies tested a total of 12 distinct CE Router implementations throughout the week. Participants included Actiontec, Broadcom, Cisco, D-Link, Lantiq, Motorola Mobility, and Time Warner.

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The New Zealand IPv6 Task Force is pleased to announce that New Zealand’s public sector is making steady progress towards greater adoption and usage of IPv6 – the next generation Internet protocol.

The finding follows a series of interviews conducted by the Task Force with a swath of SOEs, Crown entities, core government agencies and tertiary / research institutes.

The key takeaways from the report are:

Awareness of IPv6 and of IPv4 exhaustion is high in the government and wider state sector.

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In a project that has taken longer than company engineers anticipated, Google is rolling out IPv6 across its entire internal employee network.

Google network engineer Irena Nikolova discussed the company-wide implementation at the Usenix Large Installation System Administration (LISA) conference, being held this week in Boston. There, she shared some lessons that other organizations might benefit from as they migrate their own networks to the next generation Internet Protocol.

From the experience, Google has learned that an IPv6 migration involves more than just updating the software and hardware. It also requires buy-in from management and staff, particularly administrators who already are juggling too many tasks. And, for early adopters, it requires a lot of work with vendors to get them to fix buggy and still-unfinished code. “We should not expect something to work just because it is declared supported,” the paper accompanying the presentation concluded.

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IPv4, the current Internet protocol standard, is running out and the new standard, IPv6 is not backwards compatible. Because the two cannot communicate directly with each other, it’s imperative that IPv6 is adopted globally to avoid any disruption in Internet connectivity.

The RIPE NCC, the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) for Europe, the Middle East and parts of Central Asia has around 65 million remaining IPv4 addresses. Although this may seem like a lot, in reality, IPv4 in the region is expected to be fully depleted by the first half of 2012. The RIR for Asia Pacific (APNIC) has already exhausted its supply of IPv4 and the RIPE NCC is not far behind.

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