Rocky road ahead for IPv6
Published: 24 Apr 2002 11:03 BST
At WinHEC in 2002, Microsoft almost begged its partners to embrace IPv6. Microsoft needs IPv6 for its future peer-to-peer plans, and network companies and LAN administrators are simply not adopting it.
For example, Danny Councell, president of business IM vendor NetLert Communications, says, "As it stands now, our company has no plans for IPV6, it's just a non-issue at this time."
CTO Dave Juitt, of Bluesocket, a wireless LAN management company, comments, "it won't happen in my lifetime." It's no different in the front trenches of networking. Rene' Beltran, vice president of sales for DTR Business Systems, a Unix and Windows distributor specialising in supporting value added resellers (VAR) and network integrators, observes that his customers just don't care about IPv6.
Promising trillions of new IP addresses and built-in IPSec security, IPv6 looked like it would be a natural. What happened?
For one thing, Ralph Droms, a Cisco Systems Technical Leader and chair of the IETF dynamic host configuration working group and member of the IPv6 group, explains that while "the base specifications for IPV6 has been around for a long time (August 1998), some parts aren't done yet. For example, I'm the author of dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) for IPV6, and I'm only finishing that now."
Jake Khuon, former network architect for Global Crossing's IPv6 network design and deployment and a consultant today, says, "The stumbling blocks currently are (1) lack of wide-scale network infrastructure deployment and (2) lack of 'kill apps', that is, applications that require IPv6 to function. Currently, there are only comparable applications that function within the IPv6 world much like they do in IPv4 and don't offer any clear advantages. [Does that mean people have tried some old apps with IPv6 and they work?> Most of this stuff is more along the lines of either research or "gee look it works in v6 too" and not particularly exciting to your average user."
Besides, Droms points out, "new technologies like Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) and Network Address Translation (NAT) have been added to extend IPv4's potential addresses, and thus, it's useful lifetime." Despite slow network performance and management problems, CIDR and NAT do give network administrators and ISPs enough addresses to keep users happy.
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