AARNet to set up IPv6 project group

Stuart Corner
Monday, 14 July 2008 10:58

Business IT - Technology

AARNet is moving to set up an IPv6 project group to ensure that member institutions are able to make use of IPv6 services, and to generally promote awareness and uptake of IPv6 in the AARNet community.

In an email circulated to drum up interest in the proposed group AARNet said that the group would "support awareness, develop the business case, deployment guides and case studies on the use of IPv6 within the AARNet community." AARNet is also keen to attract members from outside member institutions.

A draft charter has been posted https://wiki.aarnet.edu.au/display/IPV6/Charter on which comments are sought in preparation for an initial meeting tentatively scheduled for 22 July. The main goal of the proposed group will be to "assess these challenges and outline the technical and political solutions to address them." A wiki https://wiki.aarnet.edu.au/display/IPv6 and mailing list have been created to support the planned group. The group does not a present have any office holders and nominations for chair, scribe and Wiki "Gnome" are sought.

The wiki lists the main inhibitors to IPv6 as being: perceptions that there is no IPv6 content worth accessing, that it costs too much, that content owners do not want to offer content via IPv6, that current infrastructure does not support it and that organisations have many more higher priority tasks to complete before tackling IPv6.

While there is widespread acknowledgement that the current IPv4 address space is rapidly becoming depleted http://www.itwire.com/content/view/18264/1095/ there is not universal belief that IPv6, the most technically elegant and optimal long-term solution, will replace it; at least not initially. One of the leading figures in the Australian Internet community, Geoff Huston, in a recent AARNet publication seriously questioned whether there would be a transition ot IPv6 in the immediate future. He said that, while the technical specification IPv6 had been completed a decade ago, the level of industry interest in IPv6 deployment was scant. "To date the common approach to address scarcity in commercial Internets has concentrated in the deployment of various forms of middleware in the form of network address translators and application level gateways."

Such approaches, Huston said: "break the fundamental end-to-end architecture of the Internet, and compromise efforts to create a secure and coherent network that is neutral with respect to the communications models and application behaviours that are placed above this infrastructure, and also seriously compromise the scaling capability of the network."