|
|
|
|
| Mixed Messages
Recent news articles I've seen paint quite a confusing picture about the adoption of IPv6. On the one hand, there has been a slew of reports showing that most of the US, including the large ISPs, remains largely indifferent to IPV6 [1] [2]. Indeed, were it not that the US public sector (especially the military) has mandated the adoption of IPv6, the American IPv6 story would be very grim indeed. Even those agencies charged with its implementation do not seem to be terribly enthusiastic about it [3]. In my opinion, however, the situation is not as bad as those stories would make out. For a start, we more or less have to expect the luke-warm reaction of the US to IPv6. It's entirely understandable, given not only various historical factors -- large amounts of readily available IPv4 space and old ARIN policies requiring paying for IPv6 space being two significant ones -- but also the twin mantras of making technical sense and making business sense. It's my firm belief that IPv6 does make technical sense; smarter and wiser people than me have designed it, and it is the only clear successor to IPv4. (We discuss some of this in greater detail in the book [4] if you want to see the what IPv6 provides, and some of the motivations behind its design.) But where we as a community have fallen down is in making the business case in the right way and to the right people. At the moment we are fighting against the innate technical conservatism of large organisations. We have to argue persuasively that accomodating IPv6 will be beneficial to the network, perhaps not in the immediate short term -- although greater attention to vendor leverage can work wonders for end of quarter budgets – but definitely in the medium to long term. For too long we have ignored that we should be fighting this battle at multiple levels -- the technical early adopters, the average technically conservative network manager, the check signers, and the CEOs. We need arguments and language that can reach them all. We also need to persuade different kinds of organizations as well as the different people within an organization. We need to talk to content providers, end users, ISPs, and every kind of purveyor of network equipment possible. It was long envisaged that IPv6 would be driven either top-down or bottom-up; it seems to me as if it will have to be done from both directions simultaneously in order to really work. Thankfully, however, amidst the pessimism I have also detected some very promising signs. For a start, significant American companies are starting to support infrastructure services over IPv6 that they would not have considered before [5]. And, in a very interesting move, one of the biggest American ISPs, Earthlink, has released an IPv6-capable firmware version for one of their common CPE units[6]. When things start appearing for mass-market equipment like that, you know that people are beginning to wake up and take notice of what's possible. I hope that these two moves herald a more proactive response to IPv6 within the US. The rest of the world doesn't want to have to keep doing it all by themselves! [1] http://www.broadbandreports.com/shownews/63947 |
|
|
