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IETF, ICANN, Internet Society urging an
accelerated move to Internet Protocol Version 6
November 15,
2007
By Janna Quitney Anderson, Director of Imagining
the Internet and Assistant Professor of Communications,
Elon University
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil -
Every time you
communicate on the Internet – sending or
receiving information – you follow a protocol.
Well, you don't, exactly, but the messages
you send when you seek a Web page or send an e-mail do.
It is the Internet Protocol, or IP.
 The information we seek
to send or receive on the Internet must have an address
of some sort – just like old-fashioned
"snail mail." Information is sent and
received online in packets, and those packets can't
go anywhere without the addresses on either end of the
communication. These are known as IP addresses.
No
IP address, no information swap.
And, due to the
explosion of networked devices in the world, we are
going to be running out of IP addresses soon. That is
why Internet engineers have developed a system to allow
many more addresses.
But the change to the
new system is not easy and it is seen as a cost without
revenue, so movement to its use has been slow; too
slow.
The Internet is a work
in progress, constantly being enlarged, enhanced and
improved by an international group of dedicated
engineers, scientists and technology developers, the
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Most of them
agree on the following message for the world:
Because the IPv4
address space is approaching full allocation, and
because major hosts including Linux, Windows Vista and
MacOSX Tiger and Leopard support doing so, we need to
turn on IPv6 routing in our IPv4 networks and enable
its support in our servers. This will enable a clean
transition from IPv4 to IPv6 over the next few years.
We will eventually "turn down" IPv4, but few
recommend doing this soon.
ARIN, the American
Registry for Internet Numbers, which assigns addresses
in the U.S., says less than 19 percent of the addresses
for IPv4 remain. And other regions of the world have
even fewer numbers left to assign. It is estimated that
there are only enough addresses to last until
2010.
 Under
IPv4 there is the possibility for 4.2 billion unique IP
addresses. That sounds like a lot, especially since it
is estimated that there are just 1.2 billion people
using the Internet today – but the expanding
universe of Internet-enabled devices (cars, cell
phones, appliances, remote-sensing systems) is
swallowing them up.
IPv6, which is actually
now in limited use in some areas, allows for nearly 340
undecillion (3.4x1038) addresses. This number equates
to 340 trillion trillion trillion. Written another way,
that is 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,770,000,000
addresses that IPv6 advocates say will obliterate
the shortage and also
allow for better security and the ability to prioritize
data. This data differentiation can improve, for
instance, communication during a disaster like
Hurricane Katrina or 9/11, allowing the vital messages
to get through.
 Some
people have said that IPv6 is too ambitious and
complex; it is a leap from a 32-bit address system to a
128-bit system, why not settle for 64? they ask. The
answer is that 64 might not have been enough. IPv6
originally was proposed as 64-bit, but when Internet
architects looked at the fact that our future will be
one filled with ubiquitous networked objects ("IP
on everything" is the projection – imagine
every consumer item assigned an IP address,
not just computers, cars and cell phones), the decision
was to plan accordingly.
One scientist who
supports the 128-bit system says the number of
addresses under IPv6 will equal or surpass the number
of grains of sand on the planet. When you start dealing
with numbers this high, they are difficult to
comprehend and it becomes equally difficult to come up
with appropriate ways to make them
understandable.
Why haven't we all
been switched over to IPv6? It has had a slow rollout
because it is complex, adoption is costly and people
need to be motivated to disrupt a comfortable routine
or to make a new investment. Most software developers,
ISPs and end users don’t see a compelling reason
to make the switch to running IPv6 and IPv4 in parallel
right now. Migrations to improvements in technology are
generally motivated by the introduction of some killer
application that everyone desires, and the only
headline-grabbing reason for IPv6 is the idea that we
will eventually run out of addresses.
"Folks worry about
IPv6's impact on their operational networks,"
explained Fred Baker, a leader at networking company
Cisco who has also been a leader in most of the major
Internet-architecture groups, including the Internet
Society and IETF.
"It requires at
minimum a software upgrade and, in some cases where
older equipment is involved it requires a hardware
upgrade, which costs money. If they are going to shell
out the money, they want to offset it with revenue.
They are also concerned that new software generally has
weak points that haven't been discovered yet. That
can sometimes not only impact the new system but also
their existing networks."
 Software
updates to use IPv6 at the consumer level are generally
not going to be necessary. If you are running Vista,
Linux or Mac OS X, your computer is already capable of
running IPv6 now and doesn't use it only because
your network doesn't connect the protocol.
Some governments –
including those in China, Korea and Japan – have
begun to offer incentives and/or set up requirements
tied to motivating IPv6 implementation throughout the
networks that make up the global Internet, and the
European Union is assessing ways in which to encourage
its adoption. In the U.S., the government is requiring
that the network backbones of all federal agencies must
implement IPv6 by 2008.
The U.S. has far more
IPv4 addresses left to assign than many other nations,
so it lags behind many in the decision to adopt IPv6.
Anywhere in the world where there's a more extreme
V4 address shortage IT managers have been working to
implement IPv6. The problem is that IPv6 addresses
can't communicate with IPv4 addresses – they
are not compatible.
Baker said the end
result of global connection makes the investment in
IPv6 today worthwhile. "I'll refer you to
Chris Harrison's Internet density map at
http://chrisharrison.net/projects/InternetMap/index.html," he
said, explaining that the map displays the relative
densities of Internet connectivity across the planet.
"People live in the 'dark' places; the
dark places tell us we're not done yet. With 80
percent of the IPv4 address space allocated and that
amount of dark space unconnected or minimally
connected, we're not going to succeed without more
addresses."
Vint Cerf, a co-inventor
of the Internet Protocol and former chair of the
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
(ICANN), explained the situation at the Internet
Governance Forum.
"The IPv6 addresses
are meaningless unless they show up in a routing table
somewhere [IPv4 ignores IPv6]," he said. "The
inability to reach everywhere in the Internet with the
new address space is a serious barrier. When you
implement V6, unless you connect with another IPv6
network, you may actually be an island of IPv6
operation."
 Cerf said
it is vital to adopt policies to encourage all Internet
service providers to allow connectivity.
"Governments could choose to subsidize the cost of
inter-exchange points that would encourage
interconnection using IPv6 address space so as to reach
as quickly as possible a fully connected IPv6 system in
parallel with the IPv4 system," he said.
The Internet began in
the 1960s as a connection between just two and then
just a few computers in the United States. It was a
simple thing at first for the engineers and computer
scientists who built the Internet to assign addresses.
As the network grew, one of them, Jon Postel,
established the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority
(IANA), which later began to be operated under the
auspices of ICANN.
IANA assigns blocks of
IP numbers to the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs)
like ARIN, each of which distributes IP addresses in
various areas of the world. Because IPv4 numbers are in
short supply, the assigning of blocks of V4 numbers
becomes extremely political. Introducing IPv6
everywhere would help relieve a great deal of the
political pressure.
When IGF participant
Alain
Durand asked Vint Cerf,
"What can we do?" Cerf replied, "If you
go to Internet service providers and say to them,
'I want to provide my content on IPv6. What can you
do for me? What kind of access can you give me? And,
oh, by the way, what reach do I have? How well can I
touch the rest of the Internet using IPv6?'
"If more of us in
the community that consume Internet services or provide
Internet services through the ISPs went to them and
said, 'I now need IPv6 as well as IPv4,' it
might persuade them that they need to supply it. Right
now, they're not convinced because they're not
hearing very much demand. I urge you to raise the issue
with as many ISPs as you are able to."
IPv6 has a few critics.
Some have expressed concerns that the larger header
size of the IPv6 addresses will slow effective
transmission rates. They also say the interface in this
address system is trackable even in a mobile system,
which raises privacy concerns. But Baker says computer
security experts have used IPv4 addresses to track down
stolen network interface cards (these are called NICs
– every computer has a card with a unique
address), so the tracing capability is present in
today’s networks already. "There are also
other problems, notably in routing, that IPv6
doesn't address and critics wish it did, but the
security and quality-of-service discussion surrounding
IPv6 is mostly hype," he added.
 Nobody
can estimate the cost of the transition to IPv6, which
requires some intense updating of applications to
support the increased address lengths. For instance,
IPv6 readiness is already built into some software,
including some desktop and server operating systems,
but most Internet content and services are still
structured to be incompatible with IPv6. And Internet
service providers (companies like as Earthlink and AOL)
have to make changes so firewalls, management,
monitoring and other systems are compatible with IPv6
before its addresses will work.
But no matter what the
arguments or complications are at this point, the fact
is the Internet is mostly operating on IPv4 now and it
must be transitioned to running IPv6 in parallel at a
faster rate than it is at this point. An overnight
switch of a significant proportion would raise
problems, so the people who build and operate the
Internet are hoping that the transition speed picks up.
"To be clear,"
Cerf said, "if we finally exhaust the IPv4 pool it
doesn't mean the Internet stops working, but people
wanting an IPv4 address won't get one. If there is
an Internet that does not support IPv6, not getting an
IPv4 address means not getting on the net."
No
one wants to see a mad rush to change when we hit
"zero" on remaining IPv4 addresses sometime
in the next five years, thus individuals in the know
and the leaders of governance organizations such as
ICANN and IETF are urging the active move to IPv6 now.
"We would like to
see IPv6 turned on in everybody's networks,"
Baker said.
For more
information, go to:
IPv6 resource
website: http://www.ipv6.org/
IPv6 Wikipedia
page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6
Internet Society
FAQ: http://www.isoc.org/educpillar/resources/ipv6_faq.shtml
Downloadable ICANN fact sheet on
IPv6:
http://www.icann.org/announcements/factsheet-ipv6-26oct07.pdf
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