We saw it in San Jose, then in Taipei and in Philadelphia and now it is about to happen in Denver Colorado!

Yes, the IPv6 hour is about to occur a fourth and even a fifth time! The upcoming ARIN XXI will have a pre-game and a main event IPv6 hour with technical staff to assist the neophytes on their first dive into the IPv6 only world.

This adventure and associated presentations should help dispel some of the misgivings that the road to IPv6 is fraught with daunting obstacles.

In the meantime, early March, a highlight of the Geneva Auto show was the first European appearance of the Tata Nano while in another corner of Palexpo, around 250 people attended the third Fully Networked Car Workshop. Last year, I mentioned that the notion of IPv6 surfaced in a number of the 2007 presentations. This time around, the impact of IPv6 on ITS (Intelligent Transport Systems/Services) was a topic on its own with a revealing and well timed presentation by Thierry Ernst of Inria, the French Institute of Research in Informatics and Automation.

The benefits of car communications on road safety, energy savings, maintenance and passenger infotainment are well documented and progress in standardization and technology development continues unabated. Not surprisingly IPv6 was recommended early on for vehicle communication standardization initiatives such as under CALM, C2C or CVIS (industry specific additions to the acronym soup) to later scale to millions of vehicles, each requiring multiple addresses. Sounds familiar? And this does not cover trucking or air and sea transport.

The most interesting observation is a confluence of the looming IPv4 address exhaustion and the start of more widespread commercial deployment of ITS in a 2010-2012 timeframe. Lots of people active in the ITS development have focused their efforts on the familiar IPv4, unaware or oblivious of the coming brick wall of address shortages. Hence the timeliness of Thierry’s intervention; adding the obvious benefits of IPv6 in a network in motion (NEMO) environment, the case becomes rock solid.

A perfect illustration of the need to sensitize the various industry verticals as to the importance and relative urgency to include IPv6 in their current product and service development cycle.

IPv4 starts to run on a very low battery indeed.

Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in these articles are solely those of the author and are not in any way attributable to nor reflect any existing or planned official policy or position of his employer in respect thereto.