Cable, ISP, Other Industries Working to Stay on Top of IPv6 Transition

Comcast is running field trials of IPv6 deployments, and Time Warner Cable is using dual stack, a method of making the transition that supports both IPv4 and IPv6 protocols, CableLabs said. AT&T is helping its business and residential consumers with IPv6 readiness and transition. The company said it’s using several methods to prepare its own network. The effort includes everything from aggressively conserving and reclaiming addresses to full-scale upgrading infrastructure “to minimize risk and customer impacts,” the telco said. The protocol will be enabled on remote access, hosting services, VoIP and other IP add-on services throughout 2011, AT&T said.

The last available block of IPv4 addresses was allocated to APNIC, the IP address registry for the Asia-Pacific Region, said a short announcement Tuesday by Leo Vegoda, the Internet Assigned Numbers Registry (IANA) number resources manager at ICANN. IANA has already agreed to allocate the remaining five IPv4 blocks to the five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs), including the one for North America, ARIN. APNIC, ARIN and the European RIR RIPE all expect to hand out the final IPv4 blocks to their member companies over the next few months. With all the 4 billion IPv4 addresses gone, migration to IPv6 numbers will be key, RIR experts have been saying for months.

Several U.S. government directives will ensure federal migration, including a directive obliging all agencies to deploy IPv6 on their public facing websites before September 2012. Other directives call for designating IPv6 transition managers for all agencies and an IPv6-oriented procurement policy. By September 2014, agencies must also upgrade their internal infrastructure to native IPv6. While IPv4 and IPv6 will be used in parallel for years -- mostly over so-called dual stack networks -- and normal users are expected to not notice the transition, there is a flurry of activity to promote awareness for Internet providers, hardware vendors and big content providers over the coming month, including an international conference in Paris Feb. 8-11 and a World IPv6 day June 8. That day, many large providers like Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Akamai and Limelight Networks will offer their content over IPv6 for a 24-hour “test-drive.” Companies like Google are afraid that bugs in hardware will result in at least some users’ machines taking too long to resolve to their site.

"Cable operators are fairly far along in their plans,” said Chris Donley, CableLabs’ project director for network protocols. “All the players in the Internet ecosystem need to move to make this a success,” he said of the transition and companies including Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. They “all need to move over the new protocol as well,” Donley noted. “We have a number of CE vendors who we work with on a regular basis just through CableLabs activities” as a matter of course, he said. “There is a lot of work going on behind the scenes facilitating interactions between the service providers and the content providers and the equipment providers.” The efforts include panels at industry conventions such as the Consumer Electronics Show, meetings on the subject organized by CableLabs, and less formal discussions among the CE, cable and Internet industries, CEA and CableLabs officials said.

CE companies are also working with other industries on the transition, said CEA Vice President Brian Markwalter. “Now that we're kind of moving forward to a phase that’s probably a little more appropriate for a trade association” to take an active role in, “you'll see us having more of a broad dialogue,” he predicted. “It’s a transition like many others this industry has been through before” -- whether from analog to digital full-power TV broadcasts or from VHS to DVD and Blu-Ray, Markwalter said. “In this case, part of what CableLabs is doing is very helpful,” and “we'll need it to then grow out from that discussion about the pipe to the full implications from content to end-device: What does it mean as we try to use these dual stack approaches and these other things to bridge the gap during the transition."

There’s been plenty of talk about the IPv6 transition among rural telcos, said a rural carrier association spokesman. “Everyone knows they need to upgrade,” he said. “It’s a question of what path they're going to use.” A panel on what rural carriers can do to make a successful transition will take place this year at a conference sponsored by the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association and the Organization for the Promotion and Advancement of Small Telecommunications Companies, the spokesman said.

"My expectation would be that any major Unix vendor is IPv6-ready at this point,” said David Lounsbury, chief technology officer for the Open Group. It advances the use of technology standards and helps Unix vendors, a group that includes Apple and IBM. The technology vendors and buyers working together at the Open Group drove the need for Unix’s IPv6 capabilities, he said. “They worked together to create that readiness.”