Education 

Internet Information and Resources

Mat Ford, Technology Program Manager with the Internet Society (ISOC), discusses IPv6 deployment, the role of government and the risks of inaction.

Source: www.ipv6actnow.org

Transcript

I'm Technology Program Manager for ISOC, working in the Standards and Technology department. We are simply interested in the health of the network and the best outcome for the End Users. We can provide neutral spaces for the community to come together, whether that's network operators talking to each other or network operators talking with content providers. Our connections between both the technology industry, the standards experts, the technology experts in the IETF, and our links into the wider user community and the public policy realms gives us a sort of bridging role to play there as well I think, because a lot of the technology community talk amongst themselves and don't get out to those other areas. We can create a space for those conversations to happen, where they otherwise perhaps wouldn't, and I think that's particularly important for IPv6 deployment because a lot of it is about building confidence, and so that's really what we're trying to do very much at the moment in ISOC with our programs on IPv6 deployment.

There's a number of aspects to that, the role of governments and regulators in IPv6 deployment. I think, like all content providers, governments have a responsibility to make their content available over IPv6, and perhaps a stronger responsibility than most content providers, because those services have to be available to their full citizenry, and so IPv6 is going to be a key component in that. And governments also have a role to play in raising awareness of IPv6 and the importance of that for their industry, for their economy and the health of their network. I think, as to whether there is a role for them to go beyond that, it's debatable; governments and regulators are very reluctant to choose winners when it comes to technology change, and I think that there's a lot of history there with regards to other technologies, and sometimes you might get it right, and sometimes you might get it wrong, and I think at the end of the day, they're not necessarily the technology experts and it's perhaps better left to the market ultimately for the technology deployment to happen. But having said that, there is a role for them to play in raising awareness of the issue and making their services available over IPv6.

I think for many years we've heard about specialist equipment like load balancers or firewall appliances not having IPv6 support, or having very patchy IPv6 support, and that has been true, but the technical hurdles to IPv6 deployment are now almost non-existent. The main outstanding challenge is one of education, I think, raising awareness. Network operators need to educate their engineers, educate their network architects. Potential problems on the horizon would stem from widespread industry inactivity until there is no more IPv4 address space available. So something that I, and many others say quite often when we're talking about IPv6 deployment is that it doesn't need to be expensive and it doesn't need to be like Y2K if you start now, take your time, take a measured approach and plan it out. If you leave it till the last minute, it potentially will be very expensive, but that's precisely why we're cheerleading for IPv6 deployment now, rather than later.