IPv6 central to our Internet future

By Campbell Gardiner

The 8th annual Australian IPv6 Summit kicked off in fine style this morning, with global computing giants HP and Cisco positioning IPv6 front and centre of an increasingly networked and connected world.

The Internet is now a mission critical piece of infrastructure for almost all businesses and organisations, a point stressed by Yanick Pouffary from HP. This view was backed by Cisco’s Fred Baker, who noted that the Internet is expected to rapidly grow over the next several years, both in terms of subscriber numbers and the value of the Internet to countries’ GDP.

However, Pouffary says the recent IPv4 address run-out has seen the Internet “running on empty”. The European Regional Internet Registry RIPE, for example, exhausted its pool of IPv4 addresses a few weeks ago and the American Registry ARIN is likely to run out in 2013.

In considering “when IPv6 will become more important than IPv4,” Baker says that IPv6 adoption is following an S-type adoption curve. He claims that adoption will start to self-propel when the S curve crosses 28 percent.

“We are at 15 percent worldwide,” he says. “Within the next equipment lifecycle it will start to self-propel. The biggest delay problem at present is the residential gateway – the box sitting in the house which is often IPv4 only.”

Baker claims that when the S curve reaches 70 percent businesses will begin discussing turning IPv4 off. He says this will start happening in about five year’s time, with some businesses such as China Mobile already experimenting and talking publicly about moving away from IPv4 entirely.

Many businesses have responded to the IPv4 / IPv6 issue by employing a translation technology known as NAT (Network Address Translation). Such “band aid” models, however, can’t be sustained, according to Pouffary.

The killer application for businesses is now connectivity, she says, and for business continuity reasons they simply must have a presence on both the IPv4 and IPv6 Internet. She notes the ability of the IPv6 protocol to connect almost everything, saying that for the world to continue to embrace the mobility and Cloud era, IPv6 is vital.

“Those that move to IPv6 are able to leverage the strengths of the protocol. It’s more than just a larger addressing space. It’s about end-to-end services and applications, better suport for QoS, enhanced mobility, the Internet of Things and smart grids.”

Cisco’s Baker agrees, saying that every 3 to 5 years the Internet fundamentally changes in respect of the  payload it carries. Video-based content and smart grid and monitoring-style applications, for example, are on the rise.

“On the commercial backbone, video is becoming dominant, primarily from ICPs that colocate with some or all of an ISPs POPs. In private networks we’re seeing distributed telemetry and distributed control.”

Alluding to Douglas Adam’s book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Baker says that when businesses deploy a new technology a key consideration is when they think it is their problem or “SEP – somebody else’s problem”.

“For the majority of service providers, IPv6 is not somebody else’s problem and the ability to deploy IPv6 is extremely important from a business perspective. For enterprise networks, IPv6 can be somebody else’s problem but this depends on the context. A problem arises when their customers, partners and suppliers can’t talk to them and vice versa. For the customers of residential broadband networks, IPv4 versus IPv6 is defintely somebody else’s problem,” he says.

In exploring transition to IPv6, both Pouffary and Baker encourage businesses to look at their transformation in a holistic manner. Businesses must examine their network architecture options but must also thoroughly plan for IPv6, looking at how it can help achieve their business and IT goals.

One Comment

Leave a comment
  1. Donald Clark 17. Oct, 2012 at 1:36 pm #

    nice to see some solidity come into the chat – and vendors moving from general talk to specific predictions.

Leave a Reply