IPv6 – Evolution or Revolution?

Huston, Geoff (2006) IPv6 – Evolution or Revolution? The ISP Column.

Full text available as:

PDF - Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader or other PDF viewer.

Abstract

For some years now the general uptake of IPv6 has appeared to be “just around the corner”. Yet the Internet industry has so far failed to pick up and run with this message, and it continues to be strongly reluctant to make any substantial widespread commitment to deploy IPv6. Some carriers are now making some initial moves in terms off migrating their internet infrastructure over to a dual protocol network, but for many others it’s a case of still watching and waiting for what they think is the optimum time to make a move. So when should we be deploying IPv6 services? At what point will the business case for IPv6 have a positive bottom line? It’s a tough question to answer, and while advice of “sometime, probably sooner than later” is certainly not wrong, its also entirely unhelpful as well! I’m not sure that anyone can provide a clearer date in response to that question, but what may be useful is to explore why IPv6 will be useful to have sometime in the near term future and how IPv6 and IPv4 are likely to interact. And then the “when” of IPv6 may be a little clearer – or maybe not! To start off with this exploration it may be useful to compare where we started with the Internet with where we are today, and then see how this relates to the IPv6 story.

Archive Staff Only: edit this record