Panic stations! Internet addresses running out says OECD

Stuart Corner
Friday, 16 May 2008 08:53

Opinion and Analysis

He was not far wrong: In June 2005, the United States' Office of Management Budget) set June 2008 as the deadline by which all agencies' infrastructure (network backbones) must be using IPv6 and agency networks must be interfacing with this infrastructure.

However that did not seem to produce the desired result: A survey of US government and private sector organisations in November 2006, commissioned by Juniper Networks from SynExi, revealed fears that the country was losing the lead to other nations in the transition to IPv6 and found strong support for government to take a lead role in the transition. Dr Chuck Lynch, co-founder of SynExi said the study "clearly conveys the need for a centralised IPv6 Transition Office to coordinate the continued transition and for a national strategy to help transition the country to IPv6."

From Huston's point of view, despite the importance of IPv6 its universal deployment is far from certain. "Strangely enough, this is not seen as a high priority item by many major ISPs in today’s Internet, and there is still no particular certainty that industry will adopt IPv6," he says.

Such a scenario could seriously compromise the universal nature of the Internet; " If the Internet heads in a direction of realm-based local addressing how do applications and services operate across the entire network in a fashion that still permits coherence and integrity of operation? What parts of the conventional internet architecture still apply in such an environment, and what aspects of the network necessarily change? To what extent do we understand the broader implications of this particular challenge in terms of the longer term outcomes of the cost and utility of communications infrastructure and the activities and services that rely on such infrastructure?

Seems like Governments need to heed the OECD's warnings and act, before it is too late.