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…

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…

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…

It’s generally assumed that the growth in mobile connections during the next few years will be great but there are a couple of things that should be noted. One is that this simply isn’t going to happen without a successful rollout of IPv6. Also, even if people average more than one device, the fact that there are only about 6.9 billion people in the world today suggests that the majority of the 24 billion connections will be of the machine-to-machine (M2M) variety.

IPv6 will be needed, of course, simply because there aren’t nearly enough addresses using the old system.

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Owen DeLong is an IPv6 Evangelist and Director of Professional Services at Hurricane Electric, a large provider of IPv6-native Internet backbone and colocation services.

Most data center operators know that a failure to transition to IPv6 will eventually restrict access to connected resources and degrade communications efficiency. But one lesson of World IPv6 Day (held June 8, 2011) is that IPv6 adoption can bring immediate benefits in the form of improved network topologies and security today.

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Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME) has established a laboratory for training and research in Internet protocol version 6 (IPv6), located at the Department of Telecommunications in the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Informatics. The purpose of the lab is to provide an open environment for validating solutions, network setups, and applications built on IPv6 and to provide onsite and online training in IPv6-related information and communications technology solutions to academics, government administrators, and telecom specialists.

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The telecommunications industry has been around for quite some time. Whether you take it as a starting date the first efforts with the wired telegraph in the 1830’s, or the telephone in the 1870’s, this industry has been around for quite a long time. During this periods it has made huge achievements, and there is no doubt that the impacts of this industry have changed our lives in many ways. Indeed, this industry has a rich history of achievement. It is literally amazing that this industry has managed to preserve dial tone on telephone handsets while completely changing the underlying network and switching fabric of the telephone system numerous times.

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There is a lot more to IPv6 than just a lot more addresses, including redesigned protocols, better routing, security improvements and finally getting rid of Network Address Translation. In this sponsored brief, How to Prepare for IPv6 Networking by Ed Tittel and Jeff Carrell, they dive into the nuts and bolts of IPv6 and show you what you need to know to start planning your network’s transition.

Based on hands-on evaluation of many networking products, the authors will show you what changes you need to make to your networking infrastructure, how you deal with the lack of native IPv6 Internet access, and what particular things you need to upgrade to enable key networking services. There is even a sample case study showing you the time and effort it takes to get IPv6 setup on a typical small business network.

More from Read Write Enterprise…

The Internet ran out of old-style addresses months ago, and the vast majority of consumers never even noticed. The Consumer Electronics Association has formed the IPv6 Transition Working Group to help make sure things stay that way. This is important to the entertainment industry’s continued growth into a future of content that is always available to consumers who expect to access it anywhere, any time and using the device of their choosing.

Chaired by John Brzozowski, chief architect, IPv6 and Distinguished Engineer, Comcast, the working group will coordinate consumer electronics manufacturers, service providers and retailers as the Internet transitions from IPv4 addressing to IPv6.

More from Digital Media News…

IPv6 is essential to the continued growth of the internet, due to its vastly expanded addressing space.

Early adoption sectors include markets with strong growth in residential broadband, such as India and China, cable TV providers looking to deliver IP entertainment content to the home and mobile operators growing their population of IP end points, such as smartphones.

Between them, these environments require hundreds of millions of new IP addresses that are simply not available in IPv4, forcing providers to use IPv6.

More from Computing…