IPv6 Said Gaining Momentum, But Not Fast Enough

ANAHEIM, Calif. -- IPv6 is gaining momentum, said representatives of Comcast and Netflix on an Internet Society panel at the Internet Engineering Task Force meeting this week. But Geoff Huston, chief technology officer of the Asian Regional Internet Registry, APNIC, said uptake of IPv6 in the market is still much too slow, with IPv4 numbers (less than 10 percent of the 4.3 billion are unallocated) running out in 2012.

Comcast is preparing an IPv6 trial over fiber and cable DOCSIS connections, with 5,500 customers already signed up. “There is market response,” said Jason Livingood, Comcast executive director of Internet systems engineering, saying some of the 5,500 IPv6 customers were new customers that came because of the IPv6 offer. “We were pleasantly surprised,” said Livingood. Also, the amount of traffic using so-called IPv6 tunneling mechanisms grew 500 percent during the last 45 days. “It started from a low level, but still this is a considerable growth,” he said.

The Comcast trial is to run from April through 2010, with plans to deploy IPv6 afterward region by region. According to Comcast, there are many parts of the infrastructure that now support IPv6 natively: the backbone, peering points or the Domain Name System. During the trial Comcast wants to check on customer devices and also applications that must be adapted.

Netflix Network Engineering Manager Dave Temkin said: “We were surprised how easy it was to do this, both for the website and the corporate network.” Temkin said a very strong driver for business was possible differentiated services with IPv6. If services perform better over IPv6, a provider like Netflix must use it to compete with others who which might offer fast IPv6 video services.

More content providers are expected to start offering their service over IPv6, said Leslie Daigle, chief Internet technology officer of ISOC. Ebay is expected to do its IPv6 start this year, Daigle said.

But Huston portrayed the situation much less favorably. While IPv6 last year has grown faster than IPv4 with regard to routing, at the current pace IPv6 would be only 80 percent of the IPv4 Internet by 2026. Huston said there’s virtually no take-up from the mobile operator community so far, even though they're giving out millions of devices in need of IP addresses every year.

Huston is worried that “IPv6, openness and neutrality will become casualties” in the process because large telecom operators will hide their customer base behind IP Multimedia Exchanges to only allow paying applications providers to get in, he told us: From a financial point of view operators might see this as a much more interesting business model.

Jari Arrko from Ericsson Research disagreed, saying that there were several mobile operators in different regions of the world that were preparing to launch IPv6 in 2010. He declined to name them, but observers said there’s a flurry of activity in fora like the 3GPP consortium, and mobile operators were showing up at the IETF to demand standards they can support.