Earlier this week Google’s Public Policy Blog carried a post titled “Why the next generation Internet Protocol matters” which pointed towards a meeting that the company held on the topic of IP deployment at their headquarters earlier this month.
As usual (check out the comments) the post sparked the usual set of debates around address exhaustion and the role of NATs in sustaining IPv4 technology over the longer term.
Those who read my blog on a regular basis will know that this is a topic that I have a keen interest in. IPv6 is one of the next logical steps for the internet and has the potential to drive the next significant wave of innovation around the network.
One of the lessons that we have learned as a company is that the users of technology are always far smarter than the developers or the product planners, give those users an increased level of functionality in the platform and you will never cease to be amazed at the way that functionality gets used to build new and interesting solutions. I’m convinced that this argument applies as well to the role of IPv6 as it does to the Windows operating system.
If you’re looking for some more reading on this debate I’ll offer you one more piece of data from either side.
Triggered by work that was prepared for Google’s summit, Networkworld is carrying a story titled “No business case for IPv6, survey finds”, which points to a survey undertaken by the Internet Society.
Business incentives are completely lacking today for upgrading to IPv6, the next generation Internet protocol, according to a survey of network operators conducted by the Internet Society (ISOC).
In a new report, ISOC says that ISPs, enterprises and network equipment vendors report that there are no concrete business drivers for IPv6.
However, survey respondents said customer demand for IPv6 is on the rise and that they are planning or deploying IPv6 because they feel it is the next major development in the evolution of the Internet.
The full copy of the report from the Internet Society (ISOC) can be found here and reaches the following conclusion;
The respondents stated that a key missing element in IPv6 is the lack of support for IPv6 in applications. Although no specific applications were mentioned, many applications embed knowledge of the IP version number into the implementation (specifically the address encoding) that makes it difficult to get them to run on the new protocol. Others mentioned that many support tools that have been developed for IPv4 have the same limitation. In particular, network management systems were singled out as being a bit behind the curve in their support of IPv6.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the debate David Green over at Command Information Blog talks about a significant piece of work that has been undertaken by the US federal CIO council to draw up a plan to complete the deployment of IPv6 across the US Federal Government;
The growth and innovation of our economy is becoming more and more dependent on our communications infrastructure and its main component – the Internet. The remaining pool of unallocated Internet address space will be exhausted within the next year and the depletion will cause operational issues with the Internet. Recognizing this dependence, the US Government and leading Internet authorities have determined that change to the next-generation Internet is necessary to ensure the continuity and growth of ecommerce, egovernment, and netcentric operations into the next decade.
You can find a copy of that draft business case here (copy), on first reading it appears to be a pretty comprehensive document, mapping out the current state of IPv6 deployment in the US government and a milestone based plan for what has to happen from here.