Public Policy 

Key Issues

IP Addressing

IPv6 Deployment in the Public Sector

15 May 2009 - 2nd German IPv6 Council Summit - Address by Matthew Shears

Ladies and gentlemen it is a pleasure to be here with you today. I would like to thank the German IPv6 Council for inviting the Internet Society to speak at this event.

The Internet Society is an independent, international, nonprofit, cause-based organization established in 1992 by two of the fathers of the Internet - Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn. We are dedicated to the stability, continuity, and advancement of the Internet for the benefit of all people. We work to advance critical Internet technologies and best practices, provide information, advice, and training programs, and promote national and international policies that support the growth and improvement of the Internet throughout the world.

We provide the organizational home for the groups responsible for Internet standards and protocols, including the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), and the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF).

The Society has more than 80 organizational members, both public and private sector. We also have more than 28,000 individual members with over 90 chapters around the world, including in Germany. We are located in Geneva, Switzerland, and Washington, DC, with a distributed workforce in 12 countries including Regional Bureaus in Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

The global Internet addressing system - the means by which packets of information are delivered to the intended location/recipient across the breadth of the Internet - is running out of IPv4 addresses.

The new address protocol, IPv6, offers an address space that dwarfs that of IPv4 and has a number of advantages in terms of stability, flexibility and simplicity in network management and application and services offerings. IPv6 is being slowly implemented across networks and will coexist with IPv4 until a transition to IPv6 occurs (a transition that is likely to take many years).

Issues related to global addressing, and particularly the depletion of IPv4 and the deployment of IPv6 will affect and involve all stakeholders – the private sector, the public sector, the technical community, civil society, research and academia, etc. Each of these stakeholders has an essential role to play.

The Internet technical community, and particularly the IETF, has spearheaded the development of IPv6; the work program is now largely completed - in IETF parlance the IPv6 work is now in “maintenance mode” - in other words fixing bugs as they arise - and in "new features mode" – in other words looking at how new applications and services can be supported.

At the Internet Society we believe that Governments have a key role to play, in particular in raising awareness of the economic importance of deploying IPv6. A number of governments around the world are aware of and preparing for the impending depletion of IPv4 addresses. A number of governments around the globe have designated IPv6 deployment to be of importance to government services growth and continuity.

And while we have heard over these two days about a number of government IPv6 strategies, not enough governments are engaged today. The consequences of not being aware of the implications of IPv4 depletion and the need to move to IPv6 could be detrimental to national competitiveness and government services continuity.

So what is the crux of the issue?

The challenge we all face now is deployment. Unfortunately, the deployment of IPv6 is not occurring fast enough. If this does not improve, it will become a significant challenge to continued seamless global addressing.

And why is seamless global addressing important? Because it ensures that our Internet based communications continue to be routed in the most efficient manner and to the right addressees, that our business services continue operate smoothly, that our government services continue to reach the citizenry and that our digital economies continue to flourish. We take addressing for granted now, but a piecemeal transition to IPv6 could threaten the smooth functioning of the Internet, to the detriment of all.

In order for there to be continued seamless global addressing into the future, implementation of IPv6 across national and global communications networks is necessary. While awareness and implementation of IPv6 is growing, albeit slowly, many organizations both in the public or private sector, are adopting a "wait and see" approach, sometimes along with tactical "work-arounds" (such as network address translation (NAT)) designed to prolong the viability of the existing pool of IPv4 resources.

We do not believe that these approaches are viable in the longer term: IPv6 is ultimately a necessity for the continuity, stability and evolution of the Internet.

In addition to the meta-level issue of seamless global addressing, there are a number of other considerations of importance to governments that should be taken into account.

The first consideration is the increased opportunity for innovation and growth through the introduction of IPv6.

The Internet, and the underlying networks that cross nations and the globe, is the fundamental infrastructure of the 21st century. It supports and enables the digital economy and central to its continued success are two components: 1) the continued build out and availability of high speed connectivity, and 2) seamless addressing through a stable and unlimited supply of Internet addresses.

Both bandwidth and addressing are key to the anticipated explosion of new applications and services that are expected as a result of the growing "always on, always connected" communications environment that we live and work in. We hear a lot about the Internet of things, increased mobility, smart grids, smart buildings, etc., and IPv6 should be seen as a key enabler and catalyst, with the potential to spur such innovations and economic opportunity in our digital economies.

The second consideration is increased stability and continuity in government networks and in external facing e-services and applications.

Addressing stability and continuity are essential to government and government's engagement with its citizens. E-services are becoming an increasingly important way for governments to interact with their citizens, from tax returns to voting - effectively they are reshaping the relationship between the elected official and the citizen. The availability of a significantly larger pool of addresses will ensure that governments are not limited or stymied in the roll out of increasingly innovative and citizen-centric services.

For example, the Australian government document entitled "A Strategy for the Transition to IPv6 for Australian Government agencies ‘Building Capacity for Future Innovation’" suggests that “the opportunities for increased service delivery, particularly in the health, environment and transport industries, that IPv6 will allow with its ability to have multiple sensor/tracking devices in a variety of fields" is a major driver for government engagement.

The Australian roadmap document also points to a third consideration of importance to governments, that of global leadership and competitive advantage: "The fact [is] that many of our neighbours, including the US, Japan, Korea and many European nations are all moving down this [IPv6 transition] path (at various speeds). The US has mandated the transition, and both Japan and Korea see the implementation of IPv6 as a way of relieving staffing and skills shortages by using robotics and remote sensors to achieve results that previously would have required manual procedures."

And finally, the Australian document suggests that uncoordinated government deployment i.e. "the risk that unplanned and uncontrolled implementation of IPv6 equipment into government networks could result in failures and loss of service delivery capability" is another key consideration.

Uncoordinated rollout is one of a number of challenges to transitioning to IPv6. But deployment experience is starting to show how they can be mitigated.

The most common concerns related to the deployment of IPv6 are those of costs, network implementation, staff training, etc. However, a survey of the Internet Society’s organizational membership revealed that for those that have implemented IPv6 these concerns are not as burdensome as had been anticipated. Organizations that have implemented IPv6 suggest that it should not be seen as a stand alone project in isolation from the existing network upgrade planning. Indeed, they recommend that the implementation of IPv6 take place through a measured and phased approach, one that piggybacks on existing IT refresh cycles, thereby lowering costs and ensuring proper integration into existing platforms and networks.

There is also much talk about the need for an IPv6 "killer application" or business case to drive demand. The Internet Society does not believe that this is the issue. We are convinced that the rationale for joining in the transition to IPv6 is service continuity and future growth and opportunity – IPv6’s vast address space will encourage and enable all manner of device, application and service innovation. The choice is not between the Internet of today and some future IPv6 Internet, but rather between a vastly curtailed IPv4 network (due to NATing, lack of addresses, etc.) and an unfettered IPv6 one.

Finally, there are those who suggest that “IPv6 is someone else's problem”. Actually, it is everyone's opportunity, as a number of speakers have suggested. Sitting on the sidelines waiting for one or another stakeholder to move, or being unaware of the consequences of developments in the global addressing space, could well be detrimental to future national competitiveness and the evolution of government services.

We need to move beyond the "chicken and egg" and "who goes first" type of discussions and start ensuring that each nation's communications infrastructure is IPv6 ready.

So what steps can governments take?

Given the imminent depletion of IPv4 addresses, increasing awareness of the consequences and the importance of IPv6 take-up are essential. Yet, taking first steps in this regard can be daunting. And while there is no one model of engagement for governments, research indicates that those governments that have become more engaged have taken a number of similar actions.

First and foremost is outreach and assessment. This has been done through engaging both with industry and the Internet community, and particularly the relevant Regional Internet Registries. Governments have also set up multi-stakeholder advisory groups on IPv6 (in some cases, tasking them with producing or contributing to a national action plans). Finally, governments are also undertaking internal IPv6 assessment audits to establish the scale of the task of enabling their networks.

Second is leading by example. As we have heard, Governments are putting a section or agency in charge of the issue, and ensuring that it is endowed with sufficient authority to elicit cooperation from other agencies and departments. They are also establishing reporting criteria or measurements. They are setting up working groups to respond to the issues, particularly with regard to ensuring the continuity of government services in the transition to IPv6 and starting to undertake network transition, either on a departmental or agency basis.

Third is persuasion. Once a government has decided that IPv6 is important then it becomes a matter of communications and persuasion. Getting senior government endorsement and finding champions is essential. Governments have found that declaring that IPv6 will play an important part in the future of their societies and economies can stimulate interest in IPv4 depletion and IPv6 take-up across key stakeholders.

Some governments have gone further and also implemented non-monetary incentives, in the form of public procurements requirements related to IPv6, and monetary incentives in the form of investments in research into networks, applications, and test beds that use IPv6.

No matter the engagement model that is adopted, clearly the critical first step is to reach out to and engage with relevant stakeholders, and particularly the Internet community, to understand the issues and state of play.

We believe that governments can specifically help address two of the key challenges that we all face: general awareness and the slow take up of IPv6. Raising awareness of the importance of IPv6 and seamless global addressing to service continuity and national economy is essential. Governments are well placed to communicate to key stakeholder communities about the importance of IPv6 to economic growth, a flourishing digital economy and stable and evolving government to citizen services and outreach. Governments can also lead by example and step up and implement IPv6 within their own networks.

This session is about IPv6 and the public sector. But in concluding I want to return to my first point: that the depletion of IPv4 addresses and the imperative of moving to IPv6 is a multi-stakeholder issue with significant import at national and global levels. All stakeholders have roles to play. As we have heard over these two days, a number of public and private sector players have made great strides in engaging on this important issue. But I think we would all agree that much more needs to be done to drive deployment. The future of the Internet and the future of digital economies around the globe depend on it.