Analysts debate need for IPv6 in near future

Any company that does business with Asia or the U.S. government should start using IPv6 as soon as possible, an advocate of the new version of IP told attendees of the recent Burton Group Catalyst conference in San Francisco.

China, Japan and South Korea have mandated adoption of the next-generation protocol, so companies in other countries will be left behind if they don't start using it, said Alex Lightman, chairman and CEO of Innofone.com, an IPv6 training and consulting company in Santa Monica, Calif. In addition to the Asian mandates, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget last August required all government agencies to run IPv6 on their network backbones by June 2008. The U.S. Department of Defense also has called for all military networks to migrate by 2008.

IPv6 has languished on the to-do lists of most U.S. IT executives even though it has more than 10 years of development behind it and is deployed in some production networks. An international IPv6 test-bed network called the 6bone was shut down last week as planned, because the protocol is moving from testing to commercial deployment. It is possible for a company to support IPv6 and the current IPv4 protocol simultaneously.

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Any company that does business with Asia or the U.S. government should start using IPv6 as soon as possible, an advocate of the new version of IP told attendees of the recent Burton Group Catalyst conference in San Francisco.

China, Japan and South Korea have mandated adoption of the next-generation protocol, so companies in other countries will be left behind if they don't start using it, said Alex Lightman, chairman and CEO of Innofone.com, an IPv6 training and consulting company in Santa Monica, Calif. In addition to the Asian mandates, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget last August required all government agencies to run IPv6 on their network backbones by June 2008. The U.S. Department of Defense also has called for all military networks to migrate by 2008.

IPv6 has languished on the to-do lists of most U.S. IT executives even though it has more than 10 years of development behind it and is deployed in some production networks. An international IPv6 test-bed network called the 6bone was shut down last week as planned, because the protocol is moving from testing to commercial deployment. It is possible for a company to support IPv6 and the current IPv4 protocol simultaneously.

The main benefit of the new protocol is an addressing system that far outstrips any forecast need for IP addresses assigned to people and devices. The fear of running out of addresses is one reason countries such as China cite for adopting the system. As the birthplace of the Internet, however, the United States has the lion's share of addresses under the current protocol and is in less danger of running out soon.

Adopting IPv6 will be critical for U.S. companies in doing international business, acquiring or merging with foreign companies, and making products to sell in other countries, Lightman said. There will soon be Web sites that can't be reached without IPv6, he warned.

Burton Group analyst Jeffrey Young took the opposing side in the conference session, arguing there is no need for most U.S. businesses to start using IPv6 - yet. Steps already taken to solve the address limitations of IPv4, such as Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) and network address translation (NAT) have worked well, he said. CIDR is a more flexible addressing method for the Internet, and NAT is a system that translates a single Internet address into many local addresses.

"You prepare, but you don't waste your money right now," Young said. "It's going to come; it's not this year, it's not next year." Young adds he believes U.S. enterprises will need to deploy IPv6 by about 2017.

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