Stuart Corner
Friday, 16 May 2008 08:53
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
Australian Internet Guru, Geoff Huston (a contributor the OECD report) wrote in AARNet's recent submission to the Australian Government's Innovation Review warning of serious threats to the future of the Internet, two of the most critical being "IPv4 address space exhaustion and the proliferation of IP middleware; [and] the lack of significant IPv6 rollout raising serious doubts about the operational future of IPv6."
He explained 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."
It's hard to see why the OECD has needed to issue what amounts to an 11th hour warning of the coming storm: the clouds have been gathering for years and there have been early movers showing the way.
One the most significant developments for IPv6 took place in July 2003 when John Osterholz, director of architecture and interoperability for the Department of Defense, in a keynote speech to an IPv6 summit in San Diego, announced from October 2003, it would purchase only equipment that supported IPv6.
Jeff Doyle, IPv6 solutions manager with Juniper Networks, who attended the summit, told me at the time: "The whole place was buzzing afterwards. Everyone was stunned by the scope of what the DoD wants to do." He predicted that the DoD's decision would have a rapid flow on to the commercial sector. "They are a huge customer with huge expenditure and I think you will see all the large commercial service providers scrambling to make their networks IPv6 capable...If the DoD says it is going in this direction you can bet the rest of the US government is not far behind."
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