4.3 Billion Internet address space being heavily utilized and now Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) says “revolution has just started; you ain’t seen nothing yet” The advent of Internet protocol Version 6 (IPv6) means the current capacity of the Internet will be expanded to 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses. For us (Australia), the advent of IPv6 should mean a clear revolution in how the Internet is used for business but still speed is still a big issue as Australia lags behind other developed countries in introducing high-speed Internet services despite the fact that ADSL 2.0 has just rolled out by major telecoms. However in China, have taken far more innovative approaches to Internet delivery and use. China has recognized the need of fast internet services in rural provinces by connecting villages with fibre-optic cable and access to high-speed Internet services. Purpose was to offer locals the opportunity to build online businesses and stop the flow of rural Chinese to the coastal economic zones. In Australia, Telstra owns nearly 80% of all the major long-haul fibre and microwave points of presence across the country but fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) network project is still a political debate.
IPv6 is coming whether you like it or not – Australia is losing ground to Europe and Asia, where Europe already has 37% of all IPv6 addresses and Asia has 21%. Many big Japanese companies are already IPv6 compliant.
Global IPv6 Summit is the most influential IPv6 summit in China and worldwide. China has formed the IPv6 industrial chain. It was held on 12-13 April ‘07. This years IPv6 forum Policy statement is “Set the date for termination of (IPv4) allocations and the date of announcement” At the same time, as IPv6 will be adopted in 2008 Olympic Games, large scale IPv6 commercial use will be implemented by China’s four major carriers.
When I first got acquaint with IPv6 (2002 – Bangalore, India. ISP/IXP workshop held at CISCO house) my first impression was “premature baby” primarily because there were many areas to address at that time. But according to IPv6 Forum CTO, PKI for IPsec issues are still not resolved in the market place and key to wide deployment of end-to-end. So even after five years still we’re at the same place. Should say Australia is that ignorant.
Question is will there be a monopoly of IPv4 addresses by 2009-10? While current IPv6/IPv4 traffic ratio at Internet Exchanges is only 0.1% and DNS queries show 10% IPv6 support, rapid deployment expected in 2007/2008 as Windows Vista has IPv6 enabled as default and Linux deploys it’s miredo(teredo implementation)
There are many benefits of IPv6 roll-out even for the end-users; including restoration of the end-to-end Internet model, larger number of addresses, new Node Discovery Architecture, Stateless Auto-configuration, and the enhancements to Mobile IPv6 routing.
Little bit of the architecture…
According to RFC 4291 (IP Version 6 Addressing Architecture) IPv6 addresses are 128 bits long and typically composed of two logical parts: a 64-bit (sub-) network prefix, and a 64-bit host part, which is either automatically generated from the interface’s MAC address or assigned sequentially.
Further to that, A global view into the IPv6 routing tables, which displays also which ISPs are already deploying IPv6, can be found by looking at the SixXS Ghost Route Hunter pages: these pages display a list of all allocated IPv6 prefixes and give colors to the ones that are actually being announced in BGP. ISPs that provide IPv6 connectivity to their customers can be found in the Where can I get native IPv6 FAQ
As an Architect for a Telecom company I can’t wait for the transition, yet I may not be with same company, nevertheless I will be in the industry contributing to this Internets massive transition.
