Making up for lost time on IPv6: awaiting the next Internet boom, with a little help from the Department of Defense

America's Network, May 1, 2004 by Robert Poe

The official result of the Moonv6 project that ended in March will be a white paper describing how participants got a varied bunch of IPv6 equipment, networks, functions and applications working together.

The unofficial, but more important, result may be a thriving future U.S. IPv6 market, sparked by government and industry working together. Although there's no certainty that government involvement in efforts like Moonv6 will ignite such a market, it's a good first step. And what is certain is that without such collaboration, the U.S. will lag the rest of the world in IPv6 for a long time.

Ironically, the U.S. is behind in IPv6 because it started so far ahead in the Internet itself. IPv6 has been under serious development since the early 1990s, when the epochal explosion of Internet usage brought panicked predictions that the world would soon run out of IP addresses, bringing Internet growth to a halt.

By increasing the length of addresses from 32 to 128 bits, IPv6 increased the number of devices that could connect to the Internet from large-but-limited to sky's-the-limit.

But while all this was going on, others were developing technologies like DHCP (dynamic host configuration protocol) and NAT (network address translation),that made possible more efficient use of available addresses in IPv4, the current protocol. As a result, the pressure to implement IPv6 began to ease.

"For a couple of years there was a real frenzy, but by the late 1990s, the frenzy diminished, and people began to realize that we could gain a lot of net address efficiencies through these other solutions," says Lawrence Orans, principal analyst at Gartner.

A NEW ADDRESS

Nowhere did it ease as much as in the U.S. And for good reason: Having come first to the Internet party, North America had gulped down the lion's share of the world's IPv4 addresses. "Internet addresses were handed out on a first-come, first-serve basis," says Zeus Karravala, an analyst with the Yankee Group. "U.S. companies gobbled them up, and some of the other countries were put in a tough spot.

If it were simply a matter of address space, the U.S. lag wouldn't matter. But IPv6 has a number of other advantages in areas such as security, prioritizing traffic according to type (quality of service differentiation), flexibility and device mobility. Though it's possible to accomplish many of these same things under IPv4 (multiprotocol label switching, or MPLS, for example, provides QOS differentiation), IPv6 generally does them more easily or efficiently.

It also has other capabilities yet to be fully explored. For example, IPv6's flexibility could make it easier to quickly set up event-specific network configurations to handle things like concerts, political conventions or disaster coverage, and just as quickly tear them down, notes Anthony Christie, chief marketing officer at Global Crossing. Yet, lacking compelling motivation to adopt the technology, U.S. service providers and their customers would almost certainly trail the rest of the world in exploiting such capabilities.

And until last year, the motivation was far from compelling. Corporate IP users, for example, a crucial source of any demand for IPv6 that might materialize in the U.S., are even now in no hurry to adopt it, according to Gartner's Orans. "People aren't coming up and saying 'Here's how I plan to attack IPv6, what's the set of best practices?'" he says. "People are asking 'What's everybody else doing? Do we need to get ready for it?"

DOD DELIVERS

Things started to change, at least for service providers, last June. That's when the U.S. Department of Defense mandated that, beginning Oct. 1, 2003, all "assets" procured for its global information grid (GIG) be IPv6-capable (while still retaining IPv4 capability), with the goal of having all DOD networks running IPv6 by 2008. And the DOD was a major driving force behind Moonv6 itself, whose organizers included the Joint Interoperability Test Command (JITC) in Ft. Huachuca, AZ, the University of New Hampshire's Interoperability Lab (UNH-IOL), the North American IPv6 Task Force (Nav6TF), and Internet2.

As such, Moonv6, which took place in two phases, amounted to a government announcement that it was serious about upsizing IPv6's footprint in the world at large. The first phase started a week after the DOD mandate went into effect. Phase II, which ran in mid-March, established a permanent IPv6 backbone to be used for peering and testing.

"There has been more interest in IPv6 the past nine months since the DOD made their big announcement," says Orans.

Rose Klimovich, AT&T's vice president for global IP VPNs, confirms that the government mandate is already one of the two main motivators for AT&T customers looking at IPv6. (The second motivator is the urge to cater to early adopters of new technologies, she says.)

In the end, it may be a stretch to predict that government initiatives like the DOD mandate, and related efforts like Moonv6, will eventually set off an IPv6 explosion in the U.S. But a few years ago, such a prediction about the Internet would have seemed far-fetched.