IPv6 News

CircleID in collaboration with the team from Dyn Inc., will be bringing you video blogs and updates from the 37th ICANN meetings in Nairobi, Kenya (7-12 March 2010). Stay tuned as we keep this page updated through out the meetings. Updates are posted in reverse chronological order, Nairobi (EAT) time.

Coverage of past ICANN meetings:

ICANN 36 in Seoul, South Korea

ICANN 35 in Sydney, Australia

ICANN 34 in Mexico City

Comments and questions?

Please post them below in the comment section of the page or send us an email.

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Update / Local Time: Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 12:32 AM — Gray Chynoweth, GC, VP Business Operations for Dyn Inc. discusses a 2nd topic with Margie Milam about vertical integration and registry/registrar separation around distribution at ICANN 37 in Nairobi, Kenya.

Update / Local Time: Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 12:31 AM — Gray Chynoweth, GC, VP Business Operations for Dyn Inc. speaks with ICANN Policy Director, Marika Konings, about registration abuse at ICANN 37 in Nairobi, Kenya.

Update / Local Time: Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 10:30 PM — Gray Chynoweth, GC, VP Business Operations for Dyn Inc. meets with Stephane Van Gelder, General Manager of Indom.com at ICANN 37 in Nairobi, Kenya.

Update / Local Time: Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 10:07 PM — Gray Chynoweth, GC, VP Business Operations for Dyn Inc. meets with Margie Milam, ICANN Senior Policy Counselor, at ICANN 37 in Nairobi, Kenya. The main topic for this video is Specific Trademark Issues (STI).

Update / Local Time: Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 10:38 PM — Gray Chynoweth, GC, VP Business Operations for Dyn Inc. speaks with ICANN CEO, Rod Beckstrom, at ICANN 37 in Nairobi, Kenya. Big stories coming out of Kenya include further networking out of Africa, EOI board vote and progress areas for new gTLDs.

Update / Local Time: Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 9:10 PM — Gray Chynoweth, GC, VP Business Operations for Dyn Inc. has a discussion with Liz Gasster, ICANN Senior Policy Counselor, at ICANN 37 in Nairobi, Kenya. WHOIS is the main topic.

Update / Local Time: Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 7:50 PM — Gray Chynoweth, GC, VP Business Operations for Dyn Inc. chats with Avri Doria, Chair, Executive Committee of the ICANN Non-Commercial Stakeholders Group, at ICANN 37 in Nairobi, Kenya. Expressions of interest in new gTLD is the main topic.

Update / Local Time: Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 10:24 AM — Gray Chynoweth, GC, VP Business Operations for Dyn Inc. discusses the .XXX TLD with Stuart Lawley, Chairman & President of the ICM Registry at ICANN 37 in Nairobi, Kenya.

Update / Local Time: Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 11:23 PM — Gray Chynoweth, General Counsel & VP, HR at Dyn Inc. discusses the upcoming ICANN 37 meeting in Nairobi, Kenya. Gray introduces the video blog series, done in conjunction with CircleID for the 4th time. Gray also outlines the topics for this event including security and remote access, new TLD’s, the .xxx gTLD, DNSSEC rollout, root scaling, WHOIS study and more.

If you’re not making the trip out to Africa, stay tuned and watch all of the footage from ICANN 37 in Nairobi, Kenya following Gray’s hike of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania with other Internet professionals (http://kili2010.com).

Brought to you in partnership with Dyn Inc. Please add your feedback and suggestions using the comment form provided on this page or contact us directly.

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The Regional Internet Registries are conducting a Internet community consultation process regarding the recent ITU IPv6 Country Internet Registry (CIR) proposal. In collaboration with the other Regional Internet Registries, APNIC hosted a special session at APNIC 29 / APRICOT 2010 to give the global Internet Community an opportunity to discuss the issues and ramifications of the alternative model proposed by the ITU.

For those interested in the outcome of the recent face-to-face session, a raw transcript and session summary statement are available here:

http://meetings.apnic.net/29/program/consultation

I’d like to thank APNIC for hosting this session as it is important to discuss these issues publicly in timely manner so that input can be brought to the the March 15-16 ITU IPv6 study group meeting in Geneva. By having a public discussion of these important issues, APNIC (as an ITU-D sector member) can submit the outcome for further consideration in this process.

While the ITU IPv6 study group is a closed meeting, I have received an invitation to participate on March 15-16 in Geneva on ARIN’s behalf as an “invited expert”, and at that session I will focus on the comments covered in the public consultation that was just held. If you have additional input on this topic that you would like to have considered, please review session materials and then contact your regional internet registry, or your organization/company/government ITU representative if you are aware of one. I will also take comments on the CIR proposal until the ITU IPv6 study group meeting start on 15 March, and will try to do my best to convey the input received.

As you can tell, we’re attempting to be as accommodating as possible to the ITU as they explore the issues in this area, and their processes are significantly different than Internet Registry System regarding how input is received and considered. At this point, ARIN considers it very important to support these educational efforts, and hope that it will result in better overall understanding of the success that is today’s Internet Registry System.

I hope this post helps the Internet community understand where we are in this interesting process.

Thank you for your feedback and support!

Written by John Curran, President and CEO at American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN)

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The POPClock tells us that there are 6,807,230,170 of us on this planet when I looked it up at 22:26 UTC (EST+5) Feb 26, 2010. In the meantime we are about to connect the 5 billionth cell phone user this year according to ITU Secretary-General Dr. Hamadoun Toure. At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona he also mentioned that the current recession hardly put a dent in the subscriber growth. Gartner Research shows 1.2 billion cell phones sold in 2009, down 0.9 from the previous year but a strong growth in smart phones which saw sales of 172.4 million units growing by 23.8 % for the year, 58 % in the fourth quarter only! On the network side a February 26th press release from the GSA association announced that 59 operators in 28 countries are now committed to LTE compared to 39 operators in 19 countries six months ago. A further 16 operators are running technology trials. By the end of 2010 22 LTE networks will have entered commercial service. The first 2 commercial LTE networks were launched last December in Sweden and Norway. And let us not forget Mobile Wimax which is also gaining some momentum.

As Global Insight speculates, we are indeed likely to see the smart phone war starting to get more acrimonious in 2010 as software platforms and manufactures slug it out, hopefully to the benefit of the consumer. Mobile web browsing for the masses should not be that far away as smart phone prices start dropping seriously. On the network side we are likely to witness a titanic battle amongst mobile network operators trying to walk the fine line between the cost of G4 licenses and network upgrades, affordable end-user pricing, growth in market share and EBITDA. The only certainty is a decoupling between the growth in traffic volumes and the growth in revenue.

As markets and technologies evolved so fast it was rather interesting to see the sudden scramble on how to do voice and SMS over LTE. The most basic, and let us admit, most lucrative, services seemed forgotten in the data deluge. Would it be Volga (Voice over LTE with generic access) using existing circuit switched networks or would it be One Voice which is IMS based with real VoIP calls. One Voice now seems to be gaining the upper hand.

IMS implies addressable IP addresses, lots of them, no need to say more.

Time has come for an IPv6 address population clock to complement the IPv4 address exhaustion clock.

Written by Yves Poppe, Director, Business Development IP Strategy

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The Internet has two billion global users, and the developing world is just hitting its growth phase. Mobile data traffic is doubling every year, and soon all four billion mobile phones will access the Net. In 2008, according to a new UC-San Diego study, Americans consumed over 3,600 exabytes of information, or an average of 34 gigabytes per person per day. Microsoft researchers argue in a new book, “The Fourth Paradigm,” that an “exaflood” of real-world and experimental data is changing the very nature of science itself. We need completely new strategies, they write, to “capture, curate, and analyze” these unimaginably large waves of information.

As the Internet expands, deepens, and thrives—growing in complexity and importance—managing this dynamic arena becomes an ever bigger challenge. Iran severs access to Twitter and Gmail. China dramatically restricts individual access to new domain names. The U.S. considers new Net Neutrality regulation. Global bureaucrats seek new power to allocate the Internet address space. All the while, dangerous “botnets” roam the Web’s wild west. Before we grab, restrict, and possibly fragment a unified Web, however, we should stop and think. About the Internet’s pace of growth. About our mostly successful existing model. And about the security and stability of this supreme global resource.

Accommodating this epochal shift will be a challenge for the world’s best scientists, engineers, and business leaders. It will require individual initiative, entrepreneurial genius, and global collaboration. Rather than engaging in clever debates about how to divide up a zero-sum pie, we should be thinking about the investment inputs and innovation outputs of a rapidly growing pie.

One way we will handle this information abundance is to expand the Internet. Yes, we need ever more capacious networks and data storage facilities. But we also need to expand the logical—or virtual—space of the Internet itself. We need more Internet addresses.

Fortunately, scientists and engineers have been thinking about this for a long time. We are in the midst of a transition from an old version that has served us well . . . to the next, much larger version that should last for a very long time. As CircleID readers know, the older version, which still dominates the world’s Internet infrastructure and address space, is IP Version Four. The new model is IP Version Six. The engineers who developed IPv6 gave it 340 trillion trillion trillion (3.4 x 1038) unique addresses. In the famous analogy, if today’s total Internet space (IPv4) is a golf ball, the next generation Internet (IPv6) is the Sun.

IPv6 should serve us well. But it is no trivial task to manage this abundance. A new report from Arbor Networks found that a “‘perfect storm’ of IPv4 address exhaustion, IPv6 deployment, DNSSEC deployment, and 4-byte ASN support” presents substantial security challenges. In this fast-changing environment, carriers, data centers, and content providers will find it difficult “to operate, maintain, secure, and defend their networks.”

Just as we embark on this new era, however, a number of government and non-government critics are calling for more power to allocate and manage this new address space. They complain that developing nations might not be getting a fair share of the address space, nor input into the process. They want national governments or the UN’s International Telecom Union to “compete” with the existing private-sector-led administrator, ICANN.

But as far as I can tell, the complaints are mostly empty. IPv6 is so vast, there is plenty for everyone. No one that I can find has ever been denied a legitimate request for address space. ICANN has given the five Regional Internet Registries large initial IPv6 allocations, and the process is running smoothly. ISPs across the globe are getting what they need, and likewise end-users. Except—and this is the important exception that proves the point—when nations intervene, as in the recent case of China’s domain crackdown.

Setting up alternative, competitive, or parallel allocation and governance mechanisms would only sow confusion and possible corruption. Complicating Internet governance just as the network explodes in complexity would be foolhardy in the extreme. Given the openness of the Net, new government or UN controls over the most basic Internet resources could only serve to reduce access to the Net; possibly harm the stability and security of this global utility; and create obvious opportunities for political favoritism and even fraud.

Consider that:

• The Internet is spreading across nations and working its way into every business process and cultural nook.
• We are introducing huge numbers of new multilingual country-level and generic domain names.
• The number of network nodes and the diversity of its protocols and media streams are growing exponentially.
• So is the proliferation of attached devices and virtual spaces.
• Completely new Web architectures may be needed to handle the coming wave of interactive high-resolution video.
• Cyber-security threats are more numerous and sophisticated than ever.

With so many changes happening so fast, the need for a stable core is greater than ever. If we want experimentation and growth in network infrastructure and in Web outlets, products, services, and content, we need predictability in the fundamental map of the Internet.

The current bottom-up process where global stakeholders develop consensus best-practices and plan for future needs is working well. It is a process of reason, consultation, and technical cooperation. Allowing volatile politics to destabilize this quietly effective process could undo decades of progress.

Let’s not underestimate just what we’ve achieved. The existing private-sector-led cooperative arrangement has yielded something every bit as historic as the Industrial Revolution. Two hundred fifty years ago we unlocked the secrets of physical power and launched an unprecedented improvement in living standards across much of the globe. Today, the Information Revolution is unlocking the vaults of knowledge and removing the barriers of physical distance to extend material well-being and freedom around the globe. Why derail this fast-moving train when, on either side of the tracks, botnets and bureaucrats are ready to pounce?

Written by Bret Swanson, President of Entropy Economics

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This post has been co-authored by Jörgen Eriksson and Torbjörn Eklöv.

No one can have failed to notice that the last IPv4 address will soon be allocated. We have lived with a shortage of addresses for 15 years, but when the last address is allocated, the shortage will become acute, instead of just a pain, as it is today. There is much to read on http://www.ipv6forum.se and http://www.ipv6actnow.org/.

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams describes the least expensive and most effective method for making something invisible. You simply decide that it is Someone Else’s Problem or SEP, if you abbreviate. This is an approach that is frighteningly similar to the Swedish public sector’s view of the address shortage on the Internet. “It is not our problem—if we ignore it, it will probably go away.”

The only reasonable solution for the long term is currently called IPv6, a technology that has been available for many years but which few have begun to use. We wondered a bit about how well the Swedish public sector is prepared for IPv6. We talked to a person who works with IT procurement, who said that he was not aware of a single procurement in recent years that required support for IPv6. One can wonder why this is so. One explanation is that the Legal, Financial and Administrative Services Agency, which currently handles procurement for the public sector, has not completed its procurement requirements, since the E-Delegation’s study “Strategy for the authorities’ work with e-administration” (SOU 2009:86) is still being circulated for comment. Hopefully, but far from certainly, this study will clearly indicate the need for IPv6 and other technologies as a basic requirement to ensure a stable and accessible Internet also in the future!

We have several proposals for the Swedish public sector that we hope they will adopt – not to be caught unprepared the day the Internet as we know it changes drastically.

Demand IPv6 from your Internet supplier

According to a study in October 2009, only 15 percent of Sweden’s Internet suppliers are able to provide IPv6 (source). Those who cannot do so should be disqualified in an automated procurement, and as customers, you must put pressure on them by demanding that they activate IPv6 directly at installation. Do not let them get away with vague promises of “in the autumn!” If they cannot support IPv6 now, they have no place in the market.

There are also suppliers that state that they are able to support IPv6, but a critical examination reveals that it is not as easy as they promise! So demand references for the same connection type and geographic area before signing any contracts. A good example is Telia, which needed about four months from order to delivery of IPv6. And they are not even able to deliver native IPv6, but only tunnels.

Make sure that all equipment and system software supports IPv6.

Examples of external systems that must support IPv6:

• Firewalls – Many leading suppliers of firewalls have support for IPv6. If you are bound by long contracts for firewalls that only support IPv4, purchase an additional firewall. Place it in parallell to the old one and run all IPv6 in it. You will not need the same extensive set of rules or performance in a separate firewall, if it only runs IPv6! For SEK 10,000, you will have a firewall to start with and learn from.
• Web servers – Most systems in the market are IPv6 compatible. The web is ideal as a first service! Google has been testing IPv6 for a number of years by making its ordinary search service available over IPv6, although at another address: http://ipv6.google.com. A company can do the same. This has minimal impact on the existing operating environment, yet provides an opportunity to test and learn the new protocol.
• E-mail systems – Many companies today perform some form of filtering of e-mail for spam and virus before allowing it to enter internal systems. Demand that all e-mail servers that receive your e-mail from others must also accept IPv6 for incoming and outgoing e-mail.
• Operating systems – Believe it or not, but Microsoft is a shining star with respect to support for IPv6 and is clearly ahead of the open-source operating systems based on Linux and BSD. Above all, Windows Vista and Windows 7 are excellent examples of systems with full IPv6 support, but even the older Windows XP handles IPv6 relatively well! It may be a good idea for the IT department to begin testing and using IPv6 so that they gain experience prior to a broader roll-out.
• DNS – To be able to show the rest of the Internet that your services can be accessed via IPv6, your DNS must naturally identify the services that have IPv6 addresses. However, the DNS servers themselves should also be accessible via IPv6. If you have DNS servers with your ISP or elsewhere, check with them if they are ready, and if not, consider using another supplier that is!

Start training

Only short training is required to start IPv6, in our opinion. If you know IPv4, it is easy to get started with IPv6! And getting started will build experience—that is something you can not get from classes! A good idea is to gather personnel from several municipalities or the public authorities with which you work and bring in an experienced technician to hold practical workshops to warm you up before investing major sums in training. Training always works best if you have some prior knowledge!

Other infrastructure that needs attention

DNSSEC – We naturally focus on IPv6, since that is one of our main interests. However, there are several extremely important areas where the public sector could take the lead. One of them is a more secure infrastructure for DNS, which is commonly known as DNSSEC. A few years ago, a researcher showed how easy it is to redirect a user wishing to access a given website or e-mail server to another malicious one. Today, upgrades have made this a little more difficult, but it is still possible. DNSSEC with DNS operators, companies and ISPs, this loophole would be closed. Once again, the standard has been in place for some time, but introduction has been slow.

E-identification – Important decisions also remain to be taken regarding e-identification. The model that has been in use in Sweden for a number of years suffers from several deficiencies. It is important to place requirements on the system so that it,

• is based on open standards,
• provides full protection for personal integrity,
• is technology-neutral and
• is available to all players in all parts of society.

The roles of registrars and issuers of identification should also be made clear and separated. Today’s system also suffers from the fact that only private persons can identify themselves. Companies, authorities and associations should naturally also be able to identify themselves! In this context, it is important that the government opens its databases in a manner that not only creates opportunities, but also protects integrity.

Am I already running IPv6?

Modern operating systems have IPv6 activated by default. This means that you may already be running IPv6 via an automatic tunnel service without knowing it! Test towards http://test.ipv6.tk and you will see if you are running IPv6 or not! The results may vary with the same computer if you are at work or at home, depending on firewalls and other equipment.

Conclusion?

The pages http://www.kommunermedipv6.se and http://www.myndighetermedipv6.se show that very little is happening, unfortunately. There must be a demand from above for the public sector to prioritize this in its IT operations. At the same time, this is not a monumental task! It is a matter of working days per agency, not several man years.

Written by Torbjörn Eklöv, CTO, Senior Network Architect, DNSSEC/IPv6

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ISP’s are seeing a large amount of inbound IPv6 traffic originating from Google. Carolyn Marsan of Network World writes: “Google has quietly turned on IPv6 support for its YouTube video streaming Web site, sending a spike of IPv6 traffic across the Internet that has continued from last Thursday until Monday. Industry observers say YouTube appeared to be supporting IPv6 in production mode, as opposed to running a test of the next-generation Internet protocol.”

Read full story: Network World

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Comcast today announced plans to conduct production-network trials of IPv6 technology this year. The trials are aimed at helping identify and solve any areas of difficulty involved in the transition to IPv6, and to determine what approach will be the easiest and most seamless for its customers, says Jason Livingood, Comcast’s Internet System Engineer.

Comcast will test three IPv6 transition mechanisms:

• Phase one will use 6rd, a technique developed by French ISP Free that allows for rapid deployment of IPv6 by tunneling IPv6 traffic over IPv4 addresses.

• Phase two will support native IPv4 and IPv6 traffic running side-by-side in an approach dubbed dual-stack. This is Comcast’s preferred method of transition to IPv6 and may require the carrier to reclaim unused blocks of IPv4 addresses.

• Phase three will test a technique developed by Comcast called Dual-Stack Lite, which uses network-address translation to share one IPv4 address among many customers.

Related Links:

IPv6 Information Center

Preparing for the IPv6 Transition Comcast Blog

Comcast Launches IPv6 Trials Network World

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All the talk early this year seems to be about LTE deployment to alleviate chronic Apple and other smartphones induced indigestion on the AT&T and other major Mobile Networks swamped by data traffic.

The telluric shift albeit the user will not care or should not notice is that when he or she will power on that smartphone or whatever the communicating Swiss Knife will be called, it will request an IP address to complete an IP based call. A device without an IP address will be rather difficult to reach and the ungodly NATword should not even be whispered. The comfort of the good old circuit switched network core will be gone in the LTE era.

It is rather timely, if not a bit last minute, that the GCF, the Global Certification Forum, announced a LTE device certification scheme to be ready by the end of 2010.

Verizon, as far as I know, is the only mobile network Operator so far who officially announced IPv6 support in their devices and stated that ” the device shall be assigned an IPv6 address whenever it attaches to the LTE network”.

Verizon’s commitment to IPv6 seems to be further underscored as ICSA, their independent conformity testing lab became the first one approved by NIST for USGv6 conformance testing. Congratulations, Verizon.

In the meantime, Telia Sonera claimed the world’s first commercial LTE deployment in Stockholm and Oslo in December. Has anyone confirmed what kind of IP addresses they are using, IPv4 and/or IPv6? They just announced the suppliers for their LTE network extension to 29 cities in Sweden and Norway. Let us hope the Nordic countries will continue to surprise us as they have done for a long time in telecommunications.

With all the LTE plans announced lately, it should not come as a surprise to see LTE as a prime discussion topic during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this month. And while it will not have the starring role, IPv6 will be best supporting actor.

With the first LTE networks coming on-line later this year it will be interesting to track compliance and interoperability.

LTE should not be fragmented in too many Short Term Evolutions. The end-user community expects seamless high quality service, to them it is ancillary if is called LTE and works in IPv4 or IPv6.

Written by Yves Poppe, Director, Business Development IP Strategy

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Corporations and government agencies must IPv6-enable their public-facing Web sites in the next 24 months or risk upsetting a growing number of visitors with lower-grade connectivity. “The drop-dead deadline for external Web sites to support IPv6 is January 1, 2012,” warns John Curran, President and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers. “When we get to the end of 2011, we’re going to have a lot of people connecting over IPv6 and that doesn’t bode well for the content providers who don’t support IPv6.”

Read full story: Network World

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According to the latest Infrastructure Security Report by Arbor Netowrks, the Internet architecture and operations is about to face a perfect storm with the convergence of issues including IPv4 to IPv6 migration, implementation of DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) and to 4-byte ASNs (used for inter-domain routing on the Internet). “Any one of these changes alone would constitute a significant architectural and operational challenge for network operators; considered together, they represent the greatest and potentially most disruptive set of circumstances in the history of the Internet, given its growth in importance to worldwide communications and commerce,” says the report.

Jennifer Pigg, vice president, Enabling Technologies at Yankee Group says: “Earlier major architecture changes were implemented when the Internet was an experimental network with little or no relevance to most people. Today, the majority of global business networks are entirely reliant on Internet availability, stability and integrity. With the introduction of DNSSEC, IPv4 exhaustion and IPv6 deployment, these networks are facing a perfect storm: multiple, simultaneous, large-scale changes.”

Related Links: Related Press Release / Full Report

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