(Editor’s Note: Over the next three weeks, TMCnet will examine the next generation Internet Protocol standard, “IPv6” – the transition to it, its advantages over IPv4, why companies should care about it and what experts from one company, NTT (News - Alert) America, have to say about the way IPv6 is being addressed in different nations around the world. What follows is Part 1 of our series)
IPv6 is the next generation Internet Protocol that will open up infinitely more IP addresses than the current protocol, IPv4.
Why should you care?
Because IPv4 is about to run out of available addresses – which means transition to IPv6 is inevitable. You see, when the early pioneers of the Internet first developed IPv4 in 1981, they never imagined the explosive growth of the Web we are witnessing today.
They created a protocol (using 32 bits) capable of providing a little over 4 billion IP addresses, thinking that would be plenty enough for the foreseeable future.
But it appears that the last remaining addresses will soon be depleted: Recently the board of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (News - Alert), a Regional Internet Registry and one of five RIRs, issued an IPv4 address depletion notice to CEOs estimating that, at the current rate of consumption, IPv4 will reach address depletion by 2011.
That doesn’t mean IPv4 won’t continue to serve us well. It is still by far the most widely deployed Internet Protocol (IPv6 has so far only gained about 0.5 percent penetration in the U.S.) – and it’s life has been extended considerably through the implementation of NAT (network address translation) traversal, which is essentially the “re-writing” of the source and/or destination IP addresses (and usually also the TCP/UDP (News - Alert) port numbers of IP packets) as they pass through a network router or firewall (sort of like a re-shuffling of the 32-digit “deck” that each IPv4 address represents upon each exchange between any two switches -- an endless “recycling,” if you will, of existing IP addresses by gaming the numbers, often referred to as “masquerading”). NAT traversal has become a common practice -- having been widely adopted since the 1990s as a way of dealing with IPv4 address exhaustion. In fact it is a standard feature in most routers and gateways.
But NAT traversal requires computing power – and it’s prone to problems such as packet (data) loss. With the ever-increasing amount of activity on the Internet, including, especially, voice and video, NAT traversal in time will become (and arguably already is) an inefficient way of carrying traffic – cumbersome, power consuming, and often resulting in a degradation of network performance. Furthermore it breaks the originally envisioned model of IP end-to-end connectivity across the Internet.
Which leads to why you should care: IPv6 holds many advantages over IPv4, not the least of which are faster, higher capacity, more efficient and more secure networks. And because all businesses, especially global enterprises, are becoming more “Internet centric,” there’s no question that there will be a growing need for higher-performing networks. IPv6 not only facilitates true end-to-end connectivity, it drastically reduces network congestion and frees up precious bandwidth. Ratified by the Internet Engineering Task Force in 1998, IPv6 uses a 128-bit address code, and thus supports 2128 – or about 34×1038, about 340 undecillion addresses – presumably enough to hold us for quite a while.
But the transition to IPv6 is a complex, messy task that everyone including network operators, equipment makers, content providers, businesses and even consumers will have to work on together. Cost of equipment, integration issues and lack of return on investment are the main reasons IPv6 has been slow to catch on: Network operators have to layer IPv6 onto their networks (because they can’t just “switch off” IPv4 and “turn on” IPv6, so they have the challenge of translating from one protocol to the other); equipment makers have to build it into their products; content providers have to support it in their services; business have to purchase hardware, infrastructure and applications that support IPv6; and consumers will have to upgrade certain devices, such as television set top boxes and mobile devices, if they are to take advantage of the new services and capabilities that IPv6 will help deliver.
The U.S. Government is helping to lead the way for the transition to IPv6. Not only have certain government agencies been mandated to make the transition to IPv6 by the Office of Policy and Management, more recently the National Institute for Standards and Technology developed a US Government IPv6 Profile in order to specify the technical requirements for IPv6 in the Federal Government. The USGv6 Test Program, which utilizes the NIST USGv6 profile, will provide government buyers and agencies guidance on the status of IPv6 in equipment they are purchasing.
The Tier 1 network operators are also leading the way with IPv6 (and it seems logical that any major change in networking schema would emanate from the core).
Stand by for Part 2 of this series next week, when we look at how one of those operators, NTT America – the Americas division of Japan-based NTT Communications (News - Alert) and one of the largest Tier 1 network operators in the world, has emerged as a world leader in IPv6.
Patrick Barnard is a senior Web editor for TMCnet, covering call and contact center technologies. He also compiles and regularly contributes to TMCnet e-Newsletters in the areas of robotics, IT, M2M, OCS and customer interaction solutions. To read more of Patrick's articles, please visit his columnist page.
Edited by Michael Dinan