FutureNet 2009: IPv6 coming, ready or not

07.05.2009
Although say they see no economic advantage to deploying over their networks, several panelists at this year's said that they soon may not have a choice.

IPv6 is a next-generation Internet layer protocol that was designed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to solve the problem of IP address depletion under the current Internet layer protocol, IPv4. John Curran, the chairman of the board of trustees at the American Registry for Internet Numbers, said the Internet will run out of IPv4 addresses if they continue to be used at their current pace. Needless to say, Curran thinks this will cause some significant problems.

"On the day when we run out of addresses, none of you are going to notice it on that day, but it's the months that follow that turn out to be the problem," he said at this week's FutureNet conference in Boston, MA. "Backbones not going to be able to add customers unless they find more address space... the pieces you deal with going to be smaller and the routing table going to pay the price."

The trouble that IPv6 advocates have run into so far, however, is that individual businesses right now don't see the logic in investing time and money in IPv6 deployment during a recession where they have far more pressing and immediate needs. Or as Curran put it at FutureNet, "People don't see what they need before they actually need it."

Joda Schaumberg, the director of unified collaboration services for Global Crossing, said during a FutureNet panel that whole his company has seen a "significant increase" in IPv6 ports and traffic growth, it has had trouble educating enterprise customers about why IPv6 deployment is so important to their long-term health.

"I was in front of a CIO yesterday and I asked him whether deploying IPv6 was on his short, medium or long-term list of priorities," he said. "But it wasn't even on his radar."