Re: OMB: IPv6 by June 2008

[Fred Baker <fred () cisco com>]

On Jun 30, 2005, at 5:37 PM, Todd Underwood wrote:
> where is the service that is available only on IPv6? i can't seem to 
> find it.

You might ask yourself whether the Kame Turtle is dancing at 
http://www.kame.net/. This is a service that is *different* (returns a 
different web page) depending on whether you access it using IPv6 or 
IPv4. You might also look at IP mobility, and the routing being done 
for the US Army's WIN-T program. Link-local addresses and some of the 
improved flexibility of the IPv6 stack has figured in there.

There are a number of IPv6-only or IPv6-dominant networks, mostly in 
Asia-Pac. NTT Communications runs one as a trial customer network, with 
a variety of services running over it. The various constituent networks 
of the CNGI are IPv6-only. There are others.

Maybe you're saying that all of the applications you can think of run 
over IPv4 networks a well as IPv6, and if so you would be correct. As 
someone else said earlier in the thread, the reason to use IPv6 has to 
do with addresses, not the various issues brought up in the marketing 
hype. The reason the CNGI went all-IPv6 is pretty simple: on the North 
American continent, there are ~350M people, and Arin serves them with 
75 /8s. In the Chinese *University*System*, there are ~320M people, and 
the Chinese figured they could be really thrifty and serve them using 
only 72 /8s. I know that this is absolutely surprising, but APNIC 
didn't give CERNET 72 /8s several years ago when they asked. I really 
can't imagine why. The fact that doing so would run the IPv4 address 
space instantly into the ground wouldn't be a factor would it? So CNGI 
went where they could predictably get the addresses they would need.

Oh, by the way. Not everyone in China is in the Universities. They also 
have business there, or so they tell me...

The point made in the article that Fergie forwarded was that Asia and 
Europe are moving to IPv6, whether you agree that they need to or not, 
and sooner or later we will have to run it in order to talk with them. 
They are business partners, and we *will* have to talk with them. We, 
the US, have made a few my-way-or-the-highway stands in the past, such 
as "who makes cell phones" and such. When the rest of the world went a 
different way, we wound up be net consumers of their products. 
Innovation transfered to them, and market share.

The good senator is worried that head-in-the-sand attitudes like the 
one above will similarly relegate us to the back seat in a few years in 
the Internet.

Call him "Chicken Little" if you like. But remember: even Chicken 
Little is occasionally right.