Home : Networking : News

Q&A: Why switch to IPv6?

With just 10 per cent of IPv4 addresses left, Axel Pawlik of the Number Resource Organisation explains the mistakes that were made with IPv6 and why security has nothing to do with upgrading to the new IP numbering system.

By Nicole Kobie, 19 Jan 2010 at 14:50

gallery

Nobody really is leading. That’s the point.

The problem here that we all know exists is that there’s no immediate business case to it. Now if you have to change something, that will cost – either equipment or software or training.

There is some cost involved, and there’s no customers actively asking for IPv6 because there is no added functionality, there is no push really. We only know that in two years time, there will be a crunch if you haven’t prepared for it…

We quite a number of questions over the last couple of years from governments: “oh we see this, lots of our economy is based on the internet, it’s critical infrastructure, what can we do to make this happen?”

Well, not really that much. Not really that much. If you are in Western Europe, you can lead by example, of course go ahead and talk about it and make a campaign about it, but basically I think governments should lead by example and have their websites and their services available on the internet on IPv6.

What costs are involved? It’s just switching IP addresses, really.

That really is it. If we look at where we are now, and IPv6 is no big news anymore, basically all the available operating systems, software for your PC or for your Macs are able to run IPv6. It’s built in, all you have to do is switch it on – sometimes you don’t even have to switch it on, it’s switched on by default…

There is certainly an amount of training for the engineers that would have to run the network, if you’re a network provider. But again, it’s not a functional difference. It’s just longer addresses, you have to get used to them, but really that’s all.

IPv4 and IPv6 don’t run side by side then?

They do exactly that, they run side by side. But they don’t talk to each other. Which is a silly idea, somebody introduced it 15 years ago or so, when IPv6 was designed.

The engineers were basing their design on the idea that there was so much time, that everyone could have IPv6 in parallel with IPv4, and then when everything was united, then we could dump IPv4. That won’t happen that way anymore.

In that sense, it was a silly decision to say they are not compatible. You could have made IPv6 with variable length addresses, where IPv4 would be a compatible subset of IPv6 addresses. That would have been brilliant. Then we wouldn’t have this problem now.