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I want to address a few interesting comments made on my last blog.  I agree with Dan’s sentiment – there needs to be more than simple supply and demand capitalism to solve the migration problem as we define it because ideally, supply should precede demand but the question is: who’s going to foot the bill?

Within service provider organizations there are at least two groups who are personally rewarded for a winning IPv6 strategy – those who are charged with implementing it and those who are charged with paying for it.  The implementers we meet with are in sync with Dan’s view.  They know it is going to take 12 – 18 months to get it right after all, it is a huge network undertaking that involves all equipment/OSs/services/apps from the core all the way into the home/handset.  The payers however are not willing to spend one $/yen/won that will not return 1.2 $s/yens/wons until the last possible moment but the question is: when is the last possible moment?  Theoretically it equals: depletion date (is that ICANN or RIR depletion?) minus 12 to 18 months.  Unfortunately, as many have discussed before, it is an under constrained problem.  No one knows the depletion date for sure so until someone discovers it or it becomes blatantly obvious, no significant $s/yens/wons are going to flow into IPv6.

So, what does all this mean?  Well I think it means one of two things: either there will be some sort of external force to accelerate operators on their path, as demonstrated by various governments around the world, or the transition to IPv6 will be different than we originally envisioned.

If no form of external intervention is applied the transition to IPv6 will not be orderly, it will not be pretty and it will all be done at the last minute.  An important question is: how will it be done?  As Geoff points out there are numerous distasteful possible outcomes.  You know what they say about “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men”…  The IETF had the best laid scheme, years ago.  It was simple; from now until the depletion date, convert your networks to dual stack using tunneling as a tool to get you there.  Once you have two parallel operating networks, turn the v4 one off and you’re done.  Oh, and if you have to, perhaps you will need to use translation somewhere along the way but we’re not going to standardize that.  But because of the proverbial outstretched hat, no (few) network operators followed this advice.  The result is the IETF is now revising things because both technical solutions in their scheme require IPv4 addresses and if these address run out or are in very short supply (due to the service providers waiting until the last minute) then there will be a need for other technical solutions.  So now they are studying transition solutions that involve translation in one form or another.  Two hot topics right now being discussed in the IPv6 working groups are NAT-PT (welcome back) and Dual-stack Lite – whether or not they will be standardized in time remains to be seen.  In addition to transition/migration the focus also includes interoperability because the reality is that the Internet will soon become a heterogeneous hotchpotch of v4, v6 and yes, dual stack networks.

I believe the transition will be ugly but ultimately beautifully efficient.  Through the heterogeneous worldwide solution set someone is going to get it right – satisfying the implementers (technically sound and scalable), the payers (with a working business model) and governments (in the best national interest) and when this happens the momentum of this Darwinian sharpened solution will lead the way for everyone else to fall in line.

Bruce Sinclair

I was sitting there fuming… this is counterproductive I thought, we should all be encouraging the adoption of IPv6, not discouraging it.  That was the raison d’être for these IPv6 Summits, wasn’t it?  We are all supposed to hold hands and sing version six of Kumbaya, not challenge the sanctuary of the ol’ mighty IPv6…

I had just watched a presentation by Geoff Huston, hometown (country) favourite and IPv6 expert, explaining how perhaps we were too late to go to IPv6.  Later that day all the speakers at the Australian 2007 IPv6 Summit were asked to be on a panel to answer questions from the audience.  The first question was regarding migration.  I took the microphone after Geoff answered and tried straightening things out by being “on message” as I usually am.  Conveying the sentiments that being the CEO of a start-up I was naturally optimistic and that while there are a lot of doomsday scenarios that could play out, I had confidence from my discussions with our 20+ Telco/ISP customers that they would lead IPv6 adoption the right way, creating momentum for others to follow in their pioneering path.  I got a few knowing thumbs up from some of the faithful I knew in the audience and never gave it a second thought.

Then this week I saw a link to the presentations of the 2008 Australian IPv6 Summit and thought I would take a look since I couldn’t make it this year.  Seeing a presentation from Geoff, I immediately clicked on it to see if there had been any changes in his thinking.  There wasn’t but he did present more detail.  I don’t know if it’s because I’m less emotional this time but I think the presentation is thoughtful and presents a pretty even and informed view on the dynamics of the change.  Geoff’s presentation and separate article explain the various ways that could play out in this transition and in the end concludes, similar to my conclusion in a previous post, “Fully deregulated environments do not necessarily make the wisest choices”.  This implying some form of government regulation may be necessary to avoid failure in adopting IPv6.  Maybe but I think it will also take some good old capitalism to make things happen.  We will see competitive forces, some born of innovation and others born of necessity, driving IPv6 forward on the merits of what it can do for the customer.  Sure there are plenty of possible band aid/doomsday scenarios but it’s the top line that drives change, not the bottom line.

Bruce Sinclair

We don’t give enough credit to people who will sacrifice themselves trying to plug the IPv4 dam with some NAT-putty. They even dream of  a  NAT66 filled afterlife.  The growing IPv6 traffic trickle was given evidence at the recent RIPE 57 (1) meeting in Dubai in a number of presentations, including a most edifying Google presentation (2).  Noteworthy to see France with a 0.65% IPv6 penetration, largely courtesy of free.fr (2), a major ISP offering an extremely successful triple play service based on their customer premise freebox which they decided to also IPv6 enable. And, oh yes, 95% of French IPv6 traffic is native.  In the meantime it felt good to see the US and Canada doing quite well with a 0.45% penetration. Major difference with France is that here in North America 95% of the traffic was 6to4. Most likely the popularity of Mac’s and the Airport Extreme has something to do with it.  When ranked by operating system, Mac OS leads in IPv6 penetration with 2.44% followed by Linux and Vista while XP and Windows 2000 are negligible.
The rather modest showing of IPv6 powerhouse Japan with only 0.15% IPv6 penetration was rather surprising and warrants some further analysis   The other real surprise was to see Russia claiming the overall number one ranking with 0.76% penetration!

Besides access and OS support, the third variable in the equation is the IPv6 routing between ISP’s and their respective Autonomous System Numbers. There was a lot of speculation about the “brokenness” of IPv6 . Google measurements show 0.09% of clients lost and 150ms extra latency; some way to go but not that bad and improving. Major tier1 ISP’s including AS6453 are  dual stack  and peer with each other in both IPv4 and IPv6; we also see a growing number of  IP transit customers upgrading their connections to dual stack.

When the fourth variable, IPv6 accessible content, will be in place the dam burst will come tantalizingly closer.  IPv6 accessible websites and e-mail are not commonplace yet but slowly growing.  And interesting phenomena happen to CDN’s when issuing AAAA addresses to content:  immediate increases in IPv6 traffic are visible!

2009 will see the seeping become leaking, 2010 will witness the first serious cracks, 2011 will see the dam buckle, 2012…

In the meantime I wish you all a happy and IPv6 filled New Year.

Yves Poppe
December 2008

(1) http://www.ripe.net/ripe/meetings/ripe-57/
(2) Global IPv6 statistics by Lorenzo Colliti
(3) http://www.free.fr/adsl/index.html

Head over to Living with IPv6 and read about why IPv6 shouldn’t be seen as a security issue. I completly agree with his point that IPv6 getting a lot of attention related to security when there are things that are much more of concern. Just because people don’t know about it doesn’t mean that they should be affraid of it. In many cases it almost seem to be fear of change and nothing else. Some people seem to think that if things are not done as they are today then the Internet will crumble and fall. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Change is what has kept the Internet allive over the years and IPv6 is just one step on the way.