IP Convergence: Beyond VoIP, Beyond Cost Savings

It's July 2nd, 2 days after the United States Federal Goverment's mandate for all of it's various agencies to be IPv6 ready and as near as I can tell not a single agency has failed to meet the mandate.

Carolyn Duffy at Network World contacted us for this article to see if there was any last minute scrambling for services to meet the mandate, and there really wasn't much to tell her. Discussions have been ongoing with agencies about IPv6 as well as other aspects of Next Generation networks, but definitely no scrambling.

I guess the target was too easy. As I've pointed out for a while now (like a broken record), agencies did not have to convert their networks over to IPv6, migrate applications to IPv6, move all their IPv4 names into their IPv6 domain, none of that. They only had to enable their WAN to support IPv6 so that such migrations are possible.

This is fairly simple on even old equipment...Global Crossing had an IPv6 trial offering for customers dating back to 2001 running on Cisco 7200 series routers. But, progress is progress and it never hurts to be ready just in case. Just in case of what, is the question.

As I told Sean Kerner from InternetNews earlier this week, maybe if there was a new mandate that required agencies to migrate off IPv4 there'd be some real traction for IPv6 services. Until that or the big imaginary IPv6 killer app comes along, I predict that progress on IPv6 will stall for some time.

by Dave Siegel