One year left

We have just passed a milestone, there is only one year left of IPv4 allocations from IANA to the Regional Internet Registries: APNIC, ARIN, RIPE, LACNIC, AfriNIC. The Regional Internet Registries RIR will need a few more months to allocate their available resources to ISPs, and some more months from the ISPs to the end users. What is left in the IPv4 pool is a bit dirty as these are addresses that have been in use, against recommendations, on internal networks. There has been some studies to see how dirty this space is. It will not mean the end of the Internet in one year, but certainly users will select their ISPs/Collocation Centre in function of which one can provide them with address space. There could be address space trading and any kind of other oddities.

What has to be done?

Migrate to IPv6 is the solution. Adding NATs (using private IP space behind one public IP address), is like wasting money in an old car. There is a lot of misconception out there about the difficulty of implementing IPv6, but it is damn easy, on the client side that is. Enabling your client to surf the Internet on the IPv6 takes about 5mn. You configure your router internal interface with an IPv6 address and let the router advertise the new network. No need of DHCP, static IP, etc... The internal computers will pick it up, self configure and start to go IPv6. Add a filtering rule on the router to avoid the Internet to connect to your internal computers and you are as safe as with a NAT.

Where is the difficulty?

The difficulty is in configuring your servers to serve to IPv6 clients. I recommend to disable IPv6 on your servers, have a bit of fun with your IPv6 clients on your internal network, and then enable one by one your servers to work over IPv6. You need to make sure your software will listen on IPv6 addresses and you don't have any special code/script/database that won't understand the new IPv6 format. If your engineers are using IPv6 on their desktop they will become more familiar with it, and think about the implementation of it in code, all naturally.
So yes it is moving in two steps: clients first, servers later.!

Why IPv6 did not pick up early

IPv6 has been here for the last 10 years, but I think the trigger on the adoption of IPv6 was IETF 71, March 9-14, 2008; Philadelphia, PA, USA. At this meeting it was decided to do a one hour long IPv4 outage. Participants will have no other choice than to use IPv6 strictly to surf the Internet. They would be able to see what works, what does not work, what can be fixed with workarounds, and what's left to do... It was at that time that ICANN put the IPv6 glue in the root servers, so it was now possible to query the DNS with IPv6 only. You can retrieve an IPv6 address using the IPv4 DNS stack, it is not an issue, and as machines are dual stack (IPv4 and IPv6) they can use either stack to do their DNS queries but IPv6 has to be able to stand on its own ground. The other event was Google provided http://ipv6.google.com for people to have a site to go to and test their configuration. Since then Google has migrated all their services to IPv6 (including YouTube!). Netflix has done the same and many others are following. It means once you enable IPv6 on your network, you see a lot of IPv6 traffic. First all your clients will self configure to IPv6 (see above) second there are many popular IPv6 sites out there. It does not grow slowly.

Where are we in Fiji and the rest of the world.

We went around and asked the various stakeholders what were their plans for IPv6. So far the response have been interesting but not surprising, everyone says they have to, but no one has a definitive, well thought, plan. It is a bit of let's see attitude. We are still waiting for answers from FINTEL, Vodafone and Digicel. I think in the coming year we will see an exponential IPv6 uptake as the word spreads that it is easy to enable your client network to IPv6. Europe and Asia are quite in advance on IPv6 deployment, but the USA lags behind, and as the USA and the Silicon Valley leads in IT innovation, until they move to IPv6 there will be still this wait and see attitude. Once the Silicon valley goes IPv6, expect a snow ball effect. There is a lot of noise on IPv6 there already like the IPv6 panel by the San Francisco bay Area Chapter of the Internet Society or the Google IPv6 implementators conference

The coming year will be very quite interesting...