IPv6: Asia's agent of change: Northeast Asia leads the way in giving everything including the kitchen sink

Japan, Inc., July, 2003 by John Alderman

ON THE INTERNET, as on a city street, location is everything. In a world of data where an address is the only proof of being, getting a location is the foremost concern; lose that and existence stops. Internet Protocol (IP) is the way the Internet determines a user's address and identifies a packet of data. It works by assigning addresses to everything connected to the Net (which then becomes a host), and including those addresses in the headers attached to the packets of data transmitted on the Net. Only with such an address can information be sent and received. The problem is, this protocol was set nearly 30 years ago, when the popularity (and coming ubiquity) of the Internet was not even a dream. The current standard, IPv4, was developed in the 70s and adapted by Darpa, an organization of the American Department of Defense, in 1981. While France, for instance, was busy with its own Minitel network, the Internet was originally built mostly by and for Americans, so the United States ended up with the lion's share of addresses, approximately 74 percent.

Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) is the agent of change. Approved by the current standards body, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), "a large, open, international community of network designers, operators, vendors and researchers," IPv6 will be more equitable. Making the change overnight would be expensive, though, because new hardware is required; so it is taking time, the change happening incrementally as providers routinely update older hardware. But with the backing of the Japanese government ([yen] 8 billion in 2001 alone) and industry, along with that of other countries like South Korea and China, IPv6 is coming to Asia first. Both the Japanese and Chinese governments have set a target date of 2005 for full implementation.

As things get serious, the amateurs are turning pro, and big services are launching. The 6Bone, an IETF free test bed for checking IPv6 since 1996, announced in March that it would no longer accept new applicants and would begin completely phasing itself out by 2005, as commercial services become the norm. In Japan, large-scale Interact access provider Interact Initiative Japan rolled out its "IPv6 Gateway" service in March, targeting ISPs, ASPs, contents providers, household-appliance makers, the medical industry, automakers and hardware and software developers. A company signed up with the service is provided approximately 3x[10.sup.26] IP addresses per contract so that they can assign IPv6 addresses to each of their products or services.

Behind the momentum in Asia are two things: A simple need for more addresses and something even more visionary--a plan in which nearly all electronic devices, including phones, televisions, refrigerators, elevators, trains and automobiles, become part of the network. For personal electronics manufacturers in Japan and the rest of Asia hoping to regain some economic momentum, IPv6 is an issue of great importance. With the network in place, the usefulness, effectiveness and ultimate success of at whole new range of devices--consumer and enterprise--will be decided.

According to Silvia Hagen, the Swiss-based IPv6 consultant and author of the technical resource IPv6 Essentials, what drives the deployment in Asia is basically just the address space problem. "Realize," she says, "that the US holds approximately 70 percent of the total IPv4 address space (with a population of about 300 million people) and, for instance, China has 20 million IPv4 addresses and needs 320 million just to connect their educational networks." Providers in the US such as Genuity, she points out, sometimes have more IPv4 address space than almost all of Asia. Resourceful administrators have developed something of a hack by employing Network Address Translation to assign private addresses to groups of users working out of the same IP address. This reduces privacy and can put a strain on systems, so it's hardly a desirable fix.

For the Internet to fulfill even its most basic level of service in a country like China, the switch to a new protocol is certain. Says Hagen, "They simply have no choice ... How do you want to connect China to the interact with IPv4?"

In 1992, as the Internet was beginning to gain momentum (two years before the first advertising-based Web sites appeared), IETF began work on a new protocol to address a lack of addresses. IPv6 is a combination of the best of them. IPv4 offers a maximum of 4.3 billion addresses, divided unequally. IPv6 will provide 3.4x[10.sup.38] addresses. With such a number, it hardly matters if the division is equitable, IIJ is offering each customer of its Gateway service more addresses than are currently available in the whole Internet using IPv4. At least from the perspective of the early 21st century, that's an incredible abundance.

"If you imagine that IPv4 was developed in the early 70s, and it is capable of running today's networks that were beyond imagination at that time, the developers did an awesome job," Hagen says. "The same people have now learned from more than 20 years of experience with IPv4 and developed IPv6, which will be able to deal with the networks and services of today and tomorrow."