IP Convergence: Beyond VoIP, Beyond Cost Savings

During a magazine interview in 1995 I was asked when I expected the transition to IPv6 to be complete. Based on the current rates of IP address consumption at that time, and after taking the impact of CIDR and NAT into account, I figured we'd get squeezed into beginning deployments around 2000, with a large enough transition complete by 2005 to call it more or less done.

This is one prediction that sure turned out to be wrong. It's 2006, and I don't think we could even say that the transition has begun in earnest. IT managers in the government are questioning the value of moving to IPv6, all while the DoD mandated transition deadline looms in the semi-near future.

It is with some irony that all the barriers that we thought would slow down deployment have been removed, and all the drivers for pushing us into IPv6 have almost dissappeared. We thought that OS support would be a huge barrier, and yet every version of Unix that I know of supports it, not to mention Windows! We thought that carrier support in the core would be a barrier, but Global Crossing, Verio, and a host of other backbones support IPv6.

So the only thing we are missing is a reason to bother with it. Search around for news on IPv6 this week, and you'll hardly find any. I did find the following... Internet2 broke a land-speed record and they used IPv4 and IPv6 for the test...and that's about it for the week. A technorati search on blogs that were specifically tagged with IPv6 turned up 7 searches.

In said Press Release from Internet2, I quote:

Whoa, wait a minute! You're saying that IPv6 isn't even as fast as IPv4? But those guys at the IPv6 Summit in December of last year told me that IPv6 would be faster than IPv4. They said the stack was more efficient for computers to process and for routers to forward. I read a Juniper white paper that stated that video was more smooth when delivered on IPv6. One presenter claimed that IPv6 was the answer to upgrading the public emergency response communication systems. I daresay that moving to an IP communications model is the answer, but I don't see where IPv6 is necessary to make it work. One army general imagined an IPv6 address for every bullet!

For those of you looking for a business case for your IPv6 transition, watch out for people selling snake oil. The proponents of IPv6 are getting desperate to help people create positive business cases for deployment and are stretching the truth mightily.

In my own personal opinion, I think the best argument for an IPv6 deployment is just to rip the band aid off. All this debating about the value and making BS business cases is just a waste of energy. A transition is inevitable, it's only a question of when. It's not really going to be so expensive now that there's so much support for it, so just get it over with, and do it!

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And if you want an Internet provider or an IPv6 ready IP-VPN, Global Crossing supports IPv6 across a wide assortment of it's products and services.
[end shameless plug]