Slow migration to IPv6 a costly mistake

Slow migration to Internet Protocol Version 6 could end up being a costly mistake for Australian enterprises, according to Internet Society of Australia vice-president, Narelle Clarke.

Blunt warning to Australian business

In a blunt warning to Australian business, Clarke said the longer organisations delay migration, the more problems they face including rising costs.

"Australian enterprises are resting in the comfort of plentiful IPv4 addresses handed out in previous years, nevertheless this will cause them much greater pain in the longer term when they can't willingly do online business with growing markets in Asia," Clarke said.

With Internet Protocol 4 addresses fast running out, the IPv6 address allocation system was introduced as a replacement by the Internet Engineering Taskforce and ratified in 1998.

Clarke said Australia continues to lag behind countries like China, Japan and Malaysia, which has an IPv6 requirement in its internet service provider licensing agreements.

"A big down side of the slow IPv6 take up is that we will have to live with large scale intermediary systems and, during newer systems are vastly improved on the older ones, this for all that has a lot of shortcomings and adds complexity to networks," she said.

"We are going to start seeing faults relating to poor proxies and imperfect network address translation as we start translating translations. Things like VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) and Web based business transactions will start to break."

Number of telecommunications carriers

Clarke said a number of telecommunications carriers and large ISPs have deferred rolling out IPv6 when they should be leading the way.

"Telstra operates a number of platforms against which we have a then developed, multi-year plan to integrate IPv6 end to end across our entire network," Middleton said.

A radical solution to slow migration being advocated Peter Dell from Curtin University's business faculty is government intervention.

"I believe government intervention is necessary and is in the national interest because it will push business to move to IPv6," Mr Dell said.

Only last month APNIC revealed that it was down to its last 16 million IPv4 internet addresses, which are strictly reserved for machines to link the old and new naming systems.

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