No IPv6, no access to new markets

It has only been over the last year that I have been starting to look at and understand the complexity of moving the world from IPv4 to IPv6. There are a number of compelling reasons for making the move, not least of which is the access to much needed additional address space. A recent article in CIO India offers a mathematically extrapolated prediction suggesting that we will run out of available IPv4 addresses on 18th February 2011 at 7:45am – although they don’t mention which time zone that applies to!

Unfortunately in many cases migration is a national issue that needs to be understood by a combination of policy makers, users and technicians. When browse around looking for material on the topic most of what I find is aimed at a technical audience, it makes for interesting reading but more needs to be done to educate the rest of civil society.

Like any other national agenda item it really won’t be relevant until there is an impact on a given country. One of the big hurdles in elevating the debate is that the IPv4 networks that we all use today work just fine, we all have addresses, we all have access and we all have reliable service. The reality is that those that need IPv6 address space are users who are not on the Internet today, and a whole array of devices that have not been invented yet.

It is a hard argument to put forwards at a national level… to senior members of government in many countries the argument would probably come across as something like “we have no discernable national issues at this point, but we need to spend a ton of money anyway”, regardless of how cleverly it was phrased.

That same article in CIO India quotes Mike Biber from the IPv6 Forum Downunder;

IPv6Forum Downunder president Mike Biber said customers in emerging markets such as China and India rely on IPv6 and cannot visit Web sites that do not support the new protocol.

“China has a large number of IPv6 users who won’t see your Web site if you don’t support IPv6,” Biber said.

“It is beholden to us as trading partners to support IPv6, but adoption is weak.

Pundits argue rapid exhaustion of available IPv4 addresses is comparable to the global food and petrol shortage, but has largely slipped beneath the radar of those outside the coal face of IT.

“A lot of products like Windows Vista already support IPv6, so business should dual-stack support for both protocols.”

His message is simple, if you want your online ecommerce site to have access to rapidly emerging new markets you will need to support IPv6 now, or very soon.

Conversations I have been involved with in countries like India, Bangladesh and Indonesia support this idea, those countries alone have an aspiration to bring some 1.7bn people that they represent online over the coming ten years, and they’ll be needing address space to support them – address space that they will find by natively using IPv6 as they build out their national networks.

In this context IPv6 is everybody’s problem again, our working IPv4 network is no longer enough to support our goals for global commerce, our goals for global interconnection and more generally the shared goals of the Internet as a whole.

*CIO India attributes this article to ComputerWorld Australia, but does not provide a link to the original story.