It’s time to prepare for IPv6

If your business relies at all on the internet, then you'd better get up to speed on IPv6 - if you don't, your customers won’t be able to reach you. What does IPv6 mean for business, how much time is left before the transition and how do  businesses prepare?

Pundits have warned of the impending shortage of IPv4 address space for some time, but these warnings have largely fallen on deaf ears. Those ears had better prick up soon, because now is the time to consider the impact of IPv6 on your business.

For those not following the issue, here’s a highly condensed version of a long story: the current model of IP addressing, IPv4, is running low on unused public IP addresses. There is a new model waiting in the wings, known as IPv6, which will help by introducing billions upon billions of new addresses.

The catch is, IPv4 systems can’t talk to IPv6 systems. Initially, ISPs will begin doling out IPv6 addresses to customers on top of IPv4 addresses to ensure maximum compatibility - but once the IPv4 address space runs out, ISPs will be forced to provide new customers with only IPv6 addresses.

When that happens, if your systems are only set up to deal with IPv4 addresses, you’ll be cut off from all these IPv6-only users, who could be existing customers, potential clients or even your business partners. This covers anything to do with IP - web hosts, mail servers, web applications, and so on.

When will the switchover occur?

According to Paul Wilson, Director General at APNIC (Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre), internet registries will run out of public IPv4 addresses in about two years. But he stresses there’s no flag date for switchover. It’s more complicated than that.

“It’s really a matter of a case of critical mass. When you have enough service providers who are providing v6 to their users, then you’re increasing the motivation of those who provide content to those users to also make sure that they’re v6 accessible,” Wilson says.

And it works the other way, too: ISPs will only offer IPv6-enabled internet access when a significant number of content providers make their services or content accessible via IPv6.

Therefore, Wilson says, it’s a subjective question: the exact point at which anyone in the equation makes the move to IPv6 is a business decision, one based on the variables of their particular position in that equation.

How prepared is the industry?

Overall, despite IPv6 having been heavily promoted for the last 5-8 years, the message simply hasn’t got out, according to Wilson. Furthermore, he says, “The IPv6 transition, even amongst those who know all about it, hasn’t gone ahead.”

But things look good in terms of network hardware. According to Wilson, the core router and switch vendors are up to speed on the problem. But it’s a bit murkier on the consumer side of things. Although the vendors are readying their consumer lines for IPv6, there’s still a lot of IPv4-only kit out there in the world - a lot of which cannot be upgraded to IPv6. This could prove problematic when IPv6-only users start to appear.

In terms of policy, the address registry system has taken steps to encourage the uptake of IPv6, such as decreasing the red tape an ISP or business must go through to justify an allotment of IPv6 addresses.

“We’re now just simply able to allocate v6 addresses in a substantial number to anyone who has already justified v4 address space,” Wilson says. In the first week after the change, more than 50 allocations were made, which is a big increase according to Wilson.

As far as address allocation goes, thousands of network service providers have begun announcing IPv6 addresses. But this just means that these companies in question have IPs available, not that people are using them. Most providers are just experimenting and configuring at this stage.

Furthermore, this represents less than 50% of all service providers, and the amount of IPv6 traffic on the internet is a fraction of 1% of total internet traffic. However, while this may seem a bit dire, Wilson says the figures are growing exponentially.

Case in point

In late 2009, Australian ISP Internode invited its customers to take part in an open trial of the new standard, offering IPv6 alongside IPv4 on its national ADSL network. The company wanted to test its own systems and the consumer kit that its customers would typically use with IPv6.

Internode won’t reveal how many customers are involved in the trial. But Mark Netwon, Network Engineer at the ISP, says: “It is larger than we expected. Importantly, the group is large enough to give us a representative sample of the end-user environments utilised by our customers.”

He says that while customers have found that the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 “mostly easier than we thought it'd be”, the trial has provided some interesting outcomes: it uncovered some unanticipated customer deployment scenarios and revealed some gaps in software support on Internode’s BRAS/LNS platforms.

Customer involvement has also been high: “One Canberra customer produced OpenWRT firmware for Linksys platforms which works very well with our trial service.”

Vendors have become involved, too, Newton says.

“At least one vendor has been able to use the testbed to work out that they need to go back to the drawing board with their firmware support - better to find that out now than in two years' time when everyone is screaming for it.

“Another major vendor FedExed a consumer-grade ADSL modem to us for evaluation which they'd been quietly developing for a couple of months on our testbed,” he says.

Given the current progress, Newton estimates that IPv6 will be standard on Internode ADSL services in either late 2010 or early 2011, depending on responses from vendors.

Transition path

APNIC’s Wilson suggests businesses undertake a risk analysis to see how they’ll be affected by IPv6.

“The amount of preparation that anyone needs to do really depends on the reliance that they have on their online services,” he says.

“There is no testbed for the internet. You can’t simulate all of the different scenarios that can happen. And because of that, anyone who just assumes that it’s going to continue working is really taking a risk.”

How you make the leap to IPv6 depends on where you’re getting your services from. If your business relies on in-house online services, you’ll need to do some internal upgrading - operating systems, equipment and so on.

But if these online services are largely provided by external sources, you should talk to your suppliers, and ensure that they’re ready to deal with the problem when it arises.

*Andrew Collins is a freelance writer.