IPv6 News

The theme of the 40th International Institute of Communications (IIC) conference in Montreal this week was “Wrestling with unpredictability in Global Communications”. The panel I had the pleasure to be part of was under the motto : “Broadband futures”. One of the questions addressed to me : Should we be concerned about a shortage of IP addresses as more people use broadband networks for more things? My answer was predictable, at least to me.

A more fundamental question we all wrestle with however is to qualify and quantify the broadband evolution over a five year horizon. We find two major schools of thought: one sees complete mobile or at least wireless dominance, the other a happy coexistence between mobile and Fibre To The Home or somewhere near. All seem to agree on video dominance in the consumption of bandwidth and on traffic projections growing exponentially over the next five years. The updated Cisco VNI study unveiled at Supercomm last week and presented also at IIC abounds in the same direction. Their projections show hyperconnectivity and 56 exabytes per month sloshing through the internet by 2013 including around 2.2 exabytes of mobile internet and the zettabyte era in sight.

The Arbor presentation at the NANOG meeting in Dearborn provided another interesting set of facts to consider when pondering the future: the growing concentration of the content, applications and internet transport and the blurring between ISP’s, CDN’s, content and application providers, giving birth to hypergiants. Out of around 35000 networks, 150 of them now amount for more than 50 % of the internet traffic and companies such as Google and Comcast, absent in the 2007 top 10, are now part of them.

The phenomenal growth of mobile data now has some major cellular networks bursting at the seams and is leading to a major surge in investments. The latest GSM data (8) shows that 42 carriers in 21 countries are now committed to LTE deployment, up 35% from six months ago. Better to keep things in perspective and a degree of vigilance however, as illustrated by the disappointment of the latest quarter of 3G penetration and iPhones sales in China (9). A reminder of the unhappy relationship between forecasts and unpredictability.

No wonder that predicting the speed of transition to IPv6 remains a divinatory art even if it is predictable that we are about to run out of IPv4 addresses.

Written by Yves Poppe, Director, Business Development IP Strategy

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We’re long past the days when you can pickup the phone and ask the operator to connect you to “Pennsyvania 6-5000″.
Complete info at CircleID.

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An email Q&A with John Curran, president and CEO of regional Internet registry ARIN, in which he discusses the content of the just-concluded ARIN XXIV public policy meeting, held October 22-23 in Dearborn, Michigan.
Complete info at The Whir.

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We’re long past the days when you can pickup the phone and ask the operator to connect you to “Pennsyvania 6-5000″. However, the Internet is starting to feel old in that way—we’re running out of addresses for the Internet Protocol Version 4—yes, those numbers like 192.168.1.1 that one encounters when setting up a home network. In 700 days there won’t be anymore—so we need to move to IP version 6. This move has analogies in the Digital TV transition and the addition of area codes to the phone network a few years ago.

There are big blocks of these numbers that ISPs like AT&T are allocated to use by ARIN, the American Registry for Internet Numbers (and 4 other global RINs around the world). IPv4 is 32bits—4 billion possible numbers—but that’s not enough, according to ARIN CEO John Curran. He’s working to get people to adopt IPv6.

In the following video interview by Howard Greenstein, John describes the situation and gives some good business reasons why people should start paying attention to this issue. “You don’t want to be left behind on a fixed sized network in an Internet ‘backwater’” says Curran.

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I’ve often heard it said that the world is full of bad ideas. But no matter how
many bad ideas there may be, the good news is that there is always room for one
more! So in the spirit of “more is better” I’d like to offer the following as yet
another Bad Idea (http://bert.secret-wg.org/BIF/index.html). There is also the
intriguing possibility that this flawed concept could be made to work, making
this a thoroughly Useless Tool (http://bert.secret-wg.org/Tools/index.html) at the
same time!

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Billions invested in “smart” meters, sensors could spark demand for next-gen Internet, experts say.
Complete info at NetworkWorld, The Standard and InfoWorld.

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Emerging markets less prepared to deal with DNSSEC, IPv6 and new TLDs.
Complete info at InfoWorld, ComputerWorld and The Standard.

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New AppLogic 2.7 release adds autonomic self-healing operation for datacenters in the cloud.
Complete info at Reuters, TMCnet and CBR.

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Carolyn Duffy Marsan of Network World writes: “Could Smart Grid, the Obama Administration’s effort to modernize the nation’s electric grid, be the killer app for IPv6? That’s what Internet engineers are asking as they see billions of dollars in stimulus funds pumped into smart electric meters, automated utility substations and new sensors networks—all of which could take advantage of the abundant address space and built-in security offered by IPv6, the long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet’s main communications protocol…”

Read full story: Network World

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Call it a mini, very mini, Y2K. But still important to prepare for nonetheless.
Complete info at SmartPlanet and ZDNet.

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