6th June 2012: A new internet was born today!

IPv6: 10 Things You Didn`t Know About Internet Protocols

By Darryl K. Taft on 5th June 2012

The Internet Society, an international nonprofit organization that advises on Web standards, policy and education, has selected June 6, 2012, as the World IPv6 launch day. This date will mark the beginning of a new phase in the life of the Internet, when IPv6 begins to become a normal part of the Internet experience for everyone - taking over from IPv4. Last year, the Internet Society declared June 8, 2011, as World IPv6 Day to give enterprises and Internet service providers (ISPs) a chance to “stress test” the next-generation Internet protocol to see what works, what breaks and what they need to do to seamlessly migrate their networks to IPv6. It also served as a wake-up call that it’s time to upgrade the World Wide Web. On that day, more than 200 Web companies - including giants Facebook, Google and Yahoo - worked with ISPs and content-delivery networks to conduct the first global-scale trial of IPv6. For a 24-hour period, participating companies around the world enabled IPv6 on their main services. Operating systems - including Apple Mac OS X, most versions of Microsoft Windows and most major Linux distributions - have supported IPv6 addresses for a number of years. In fact, since IPv6 addresses are enabled by default in the operating system, if the network has the capability to assign an IPv6 address, the user machine most likely already has an IPv6 address, James Lyne, director of technology strategy at Sophos, told eWEEK in 2011. At some point, the entire Internet infrastructure has to move to using the newer address space, since the differences in the protocols mean that computers with IPv4 addresses cannot communicate with machines with IPv6 addresses. The Internet Society says that time is now. eWEEK takes a look at some of the key differences between IPv6 and IPv4. It also identifies some information you may not know about IPv6.

Read the facts about IPv6 at eWeek.com

By Dave Kresse on 4th June 2010

Of the many issues facing mobile operators in this tumultuous era, there is one major network transition that is quickly moving into the spotlight – the move from IPv4 to IPv6. Put in the starkest terms, if Y2K was a ticking time bomb, IPv6 is a slow gas leak.

Why is this issue so serious? Mobile operators' engineering departments are already swamped with testing for new 3G devices coming online, managing network resources in order to cope with the demands of data traffic and prepping their own 4G deployments and the associated ecosystem of new devices. With the percentage of available IPv4 addresses today at around 7 percent, it's no longer a question of if they will run out, but when. Forecasts are as early as 2011 for total IPv4 exhaustion. Unlike Y2K, which was a single point in time, the IPv6 transition is not. IPv4 addresses are not being disabled or un-supported – rather, they will continue to co-exist in what is known as a dual-stack environment with v6 for many years to come.

Many operators are unprepared for the transition to IPv6. Testing for new 3G devices alone (such as the more than 1 million iPads sold in just a month) is more than enough to keep operators up at night. The IPv6 transition adds yet another dimension of complexity to these initiatives.

The challenges mobile operators will face with the transition to IPv6 include:

Functionality Migration

A mistake mobile operators can easily make is the assumption that if their underlying networking infrastructure supports IPv6, the migration will execute flawlessly. However, many of today's applications contain IP addresses embedded within higher-level protocols, such as SIP - one example being Voice over IP (VoIP). This means that without specifically developing IPv6 support for that application, it will not behave correctly when migrated. Also, the variety of operating systems that might connect to their network will all behave differently when operating in both IPv4 and IPv6 environment. Key elements such as domain name resolution need to be thoroughly tested because all applications depend on this working flawlessly.

Regression/Interoperability

Applications and services must be able to coexist over both v4 and v6 stacks. This means mobile carriers will need to ensure that every phone, for example, with IPv6 support is able to communicate both with other IPv6 phones of all makes and models, as well as all those supporting only IPv4. All transition mechanisms within the network will need to be exercised to ensure that each potential element in an operator's network is going to work well.

Security/Resilience

Application-aware systems such as DPI, IPS and firewalls have all had years of development and patches that have gone into detecting and managing attacks and exploits over IPv4. But how do you ensure that old v4-based attacks are properly detected and handled when they come in over IPv6? And what about the tunneling schemes that would allow IPv6-based exploits to be tunneled over v4?

What do these challenges mean for mobile operators? ...

Read the full story at WirelessWeek.com