Advice for Vendors
As the world transitions to IPv6, there will be significant business opportunities for vendors who support one of the many translation protocols and enable IPv6 communication along the many touchpoints in a network. Again, Vint Cerf provides some words of wisdom:
Those of you who might be making equipment for the internet (software and hardware) should keep in mind the idea that anything that might be mobile needs to be outfitted with both v4 and v6 capability, because you may be in a place where only v6 is working, you may be in a place where only v4 is working, or you may be in a place where both of them are working and you need to get to both IPv4 and IPv6 destinations at the same time.
What's Next?
The world is clearly prepping for a transition to IPv6, and it's now a question of when, not if, IP traffic will be shuttled via 128-bit addresses. This was nowhere more evident than at World IPv6 day, which saw more than 225 businesses converge to take part in a global test flight of IPv6. The participants included everyone from Facebook and Skype, to Akami, Limelight Networks, Telekom Indonesia, Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint.
The Internet Society hosted the event, and said that, “by acting together, ISPs, web site operators, OS manufacturers, and equipment vendors will be able to address problems, such as IPv6 brokenness in home networks and incomplete IPv6 interconnection. Also, on the day itself, any global scalability problems can be found in a controlled fashion and resolved cooperatively.”
By all accounts, the day was a success, and some of testing tools developed for World IPv6 day are available to the public—to test the readiness of your network and learn its limitations, click here: http://test-ipv6.com/
When we imagine a world with myraid connected devices—from coffee makers to alarm clocks—and all of the automation and efficiency such a world can offer, we must also imagine a “phonebook” with numbers for each of these devices, and IPv6 will provide the address pool to support these dreams for at least the next century.
