Wrapping up IPv6 for now

Insightful analysis by consultants Steve Taylor and Jim Metzler, plus links to the latest WAN news headlines

The IPv6 discussion has generated a lot more discussion than we anticipated, but we're going to temporarily wrap up our newsletters for the time being. Nevertheless, please feel free to continue the chat at the Webtorials Water Cooler.

IPv4 vs. IPv6

We'll start with a comment from the water cooler that seemed most appropriate when someone answered the question, "What does IPv6 bring to the table other than a larger address space?" with the response, "More work for the network jocks!!!"

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The IPv6 discussion has generated a lot more discussion than we anticipated, but we're going to temporarily wrap up our newsletters for the time being. Nevertheless, please feel free to continue the chat at the Webtorials Water Cooler.

IPv4 vs. IPv6

We'll start with a comment from the water cooler that seemed most appropriate when someone answered the question, "What does IPv6 bring to the table other than a larger address space?" with the response, "More work for the network jocks!!!"

And perhaps a significant portion of that work will be that we'll be back to actually having to know the difference between hexadecimal and base-10 decimal math. Our colleague Bill Flanagan, noted "IPv6 apparently will revive the study of hexadecimal math. Here's a report from Network World on mistaking 0010 for Ox000A." And it is indeed a great story.

And it appears that a lot of the impetus for IPv6 will continue to come from the migration mandate that the federal government has for this transition. While we have not been able to find exact confirmation as of press time, a trusted source has informed us that "The US Gov GSA and NIST announced at a public meeting in DC [Wednesday, Sept. 24] that GSA is in the final stages of adding the Mandatory IPv6 support language for NIST-tested IPv6 devices into the FAR (Federal Acquisition Language) for anything bought by the US Gov. So what technologists and enterprise managers think about IPv6 kinda becomes immaterial. Remember leaded gas? One way to generate new tech sales is just to mandate them!"

We're all for anything that revives the tech economy. Nevertheless, this really only has a major impact on companies that do business with the federal government. And we're still not sure what the exact reasoning is behind the government mandate for IPv6.

Also, in fairness, we're not totally convinced that government mandates are sufficient to ensure a major technology shift. As an excellent case-in-point, we'll point to Switched Multimegabit Data Service (SMDS). In this case, several government agencies were among the first – and as it turns out only – users of this service. And even though in retrospect, SMDS was arguably technically superior in some aspects to ATM and Frame Relay and looks a lot like IP networks today, it was a failure in the market.

This is a topic that we'll surely return to long before IPv6 becomes widely adopted in the enterprise.

Read more about lans & wans in Network World's LANs & WANs section.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Jim Metzler is vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates.