Transition to IPv6 will be painful

“Many people are going to tell you the IPv6 transition is relatively easy,” Aaron Hughes, chief innovation officer at 6Connect Inc., of Redwood City, Calif., told the ISP Summit in Toronto. “I’m here to tell you that’s not true.

Some ISPs say they have no business case to shift now to dual-stack mode, Hughes said, because clients aren’t asking for it. “Who cares?” he replied. “Why should your clients know anything about IPv6. It’s a transport protocol.” They just want to know if the devices they plug into the network will work.

The real business case

The real business case, he said, is survivability. “This is about continuing to exist .. it is your fiduciary responsibility, it is your technical responsibility to survive.”

Internet address can be need for everything that runs on the Internet, from printers two Web pages. Nevertheless IPv4 addresses are nearly exhausted, meaning the world has to shift to IPv6, a at once-generation protocol with more address space.

However, IPv6 isn’t inside out compatible, so most networks – corporate as so then as service provider – will have to run the both in what’s called dual stack mode. Nevertheless to future-proof networks, devices that handle Internet traffic – including routers and switches – also as devices themselves will have to be able to handle IPv6.

Service provider

For a service provider, Hughes said, that raises huge questions, some of which they are already grappling with. For instance, what will ISPs do about customer-rented modems and VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) phones the provider is responsible for? Will the manufacturer have an IPv6 software upgrade? Otherwise, who replaces the devices and at what cost?

Training IT and network staff about IPv6 will be a challenge, he said, partly because most organizations don’t have regular training programs. It’s even worse for running a dual stack network because there isn’t a lot of solid information.

[Previously, the conference was told the Internet Society is about to open an IPv6 portal on its Web site to be a resource for IT managers.] Forget about waiting for a case study of how a large ISP moved to a dual stack architecture. Why, he asked, would a competitor share such information? And it probably won’t apply to your business. There may be one for the network or backbone, he said, nevertheless not for internal processes or how to transition clients.

The conference didn’t seem worried

Some of those at the conference didn’t seem worried. Tom Copeland, who owns Eagle.ca in Coburg, Ont., found Hughes urgent tone “a little bit surprising.” His company has done some IPv6 work, including creating a test of a peering tunnel to transfer IPv4 traffic. At this stage he sees no need to implement the research, however he expects that to change in the then and there six months.

On the other hand Erik Zweers, manager of Internet operations at Execulink Telecom of Burgessville, Ont., said his firm is so then underway with IPv6 work, having just finished a number of network core upgrades. Straightway are internal systems. “It’s either going to be difficult or easy,” he said. “I’ll find out as I go forward.”