This Wednesday night the IAB invites you to join us at the Technical Plenary where we will hear first hand from 5 members of the Internet community who have been embroiled in operational IPv6 deployments. They represent the perspectives of RIR's, network operations teams, broadband services, content delivery services, and Host Applications. They will share with us about their IPv6 adoption successes, hurdles, and IPv4 depletion contingency planning. There will be both moderated and open Q&A sessions.
Motivation & Background
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Studies suggest that the completion of IPv4 address allocations will occur in the not too distant future. One example, http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/ estimates that at the current rate IANA will allocate its last block of addresses to the RIR's by February 2, 2011.
Regardless the exact date one expects, the concept of an empty storehouse will change the networking landscape. In order to ready for that eventual moment, various players are working towards wider IPv6 deployment.
Some content providers are planning ahead, working to ready their content for IPv6 endpoint hits. This has recently become visible, and the volume of work is mountainous. Some service providers and broadband providers see the need, started some time ago, and are moving toward infrastructure and service delivery that can/will run on IPv6. Both face a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem: the content providers would move faster if they knew the operators had the services fully baked to deliver IPv6 eyeballs to the content. Meanwhile, the operators say they would invest more in their IPv6 services and infrastructure deployments if the content the end-customers demand was available and abundant. The two are interdependent; one cannot be without the other.
Enterprises are, in some way, the swing vote. Objectively, few enterprises, have moved to wide scale deployments of IPv6. Some have IPv6 pilots, a few have partial deployments. Yet they may hit the v4 allocation cliff harder than either the other two communities. This will leave them in a costly scurry to react at the last minute.
IPv6 deployment in operational networks across the Internet is a work in progress. Transition mechanisms have existed and been deployed for years, including dual-stacks and various translation and tunneling mechanisms. Over time, more hosts and networks are moving to native IPv6 operations. Collectively, we now have several years of experience with both.
The IAB has established this plenary topic to provide some background and input from those experienced with deployments and issues in order to empower the IETF community do its part to encourage and facilitate the world-wide deployment of IPv6.
We have a very full agenda (https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/72/agenda.html) for Wednesday's Technical Plenary, and will begin promptly at 17:00 in Convention 1 and 2, just left of the IETF registration desk. We look forward to seeing you then.
Gregory Lebovitz
Wednesday's Panel Moderator,
on behalf of the IAB
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IETF related email from
Gregory M. Lebovitz
Juniper Networks
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