After decades of talk, the time for IPv6 has finally arrived. There are several transition options available, but whatever approach you choose, the challenge will be to make sure that your subscribers don't experience a reduction in quality of service. IPv4 is likely to co-exist with IPv6 for some time, so a native dual-stack migration strategy will be the best transition option for most providers... With dual-stack mode, there is no disruption to the service if a client requests an IPv4 address. more
As rumours tend to be more accurate than predictions, the last /8's are hanging already on this years Christmas tree and one should hurry to get hold of a small little RIR block to put on next year's tree. I will miss the decade of heated and passionate debates between Tony Hain and Geoff Huston on when the exhaustion would actually happen. Estimates ranged all the way from 2008 to 2020 with Tony predicting early demise of IPv4 addresses while Geoff initially thought exhaustion would come later. As time passed the interval converged and here we are. more
Following on from last year's measurements after World IPv6 Day, the RIPE NCC carried out active measurements on World IPv6 Launch on 6 June 2012. These measurements included latency measurements both on IPv4 and IPv6 from our vantage points to selected hostnames of World IPv6 Launch participants and other dual-stacked parties. We used these measurements to determine the performance of IPv4 versus IPv6 connections. more
Dear Chief Financial Officers of tech giants, the internet is in crisis, and you can lead your organization to help solve the problem. You'll be well compensated, and you'll enjoy massive public relations benefits. I fear that if you don't, global governments will force your hand. There is a shortage of available IPv4 addresses but we are years away (possibly a decade or more) from IPv6 viability and adoption in North America. more
If you are interested in the current state of IPv4 address exhaustion within North America as well as the current state of IPv6 deployment, there will be a live stream today, April 17, of the sessions happening at INET Denver starting at 1:00pm US Mountain Daylight Time (UTC-6). The event is subtitled "IPv4 Exhaustion and the Path to IPv6" and you can view the live stream at. more
In a publication released on October 2, 2020, RIPE NCC reported its first seizure of IPv4 registration rights pursuant to a Dutch court order. Pursuant to the order, RIPE NCC effectuated a transfer of the IP Addresses from the liquidating debtor to its creditor. Although these IP Addresses could not be owned, they were apparently not legacy. Thus, they conferred no "property rights" - the registration rights were deemed an enforceable right that has value and were to be utilized towards satisfaction of a judgment. more
Recent Department of Defense IPv4 activity and announcements about IPv6 indicate a shift in their perspective and suggest potential impacts on the IPv4 address market. The shift could include the release of up to 175 million IPv4 addresses in the coming years, creating a risk of a glut in the market. For perspective, the market has transferred 380 million addresses over eleven years. more
In a recent workshop, I attended, reflecting on the evolution of the Internet over the past 40 years, one of the takeaways for me is how we've managed to surprise ourselves in both the unanticipated successes we've encountered and in the instances of failure when technology has stubbornly resisted to be deployed despite our confident expectations to the contrary! What have we learned from these lessons about our inability to predict technology outcomes? more
According to reports, China Telecom has announced a complete schedule of IPv6 deployment including commercial trials currently underway. A full commercial launch is scheduled for 2012 while retreating from IPv4 network and services will begin in 2015. China Telecom has also announced various goals as part of the IPv6 transition which includes building a self-supporting IPv6 business and upgrading enterprise and residential gateways to support IPv6 access for government, enterprise and residential customers. more
The IETF published RFC8200 last week, which officially makes IPv6 an Internet Standard. While this move was a long time coming -- IPv6 has now reached about 20% deployment -- a more interesting question is: what has changed since RFC2460, which was a draft standard, was published in 2013? After all, the point of moving from the experimental to the draft standard to the internet standard states is to learn more about the protocol as it operates on the wire... more
As Christmas were getting closer, the third time of load balancing the streaming pictures of the famous Christmas goat in the city of Gävle, Sweden, was on the agenda. My goal with this activity is the same as before, to track the use of IPv6 and DNSSEC validation. The results from the last two years are published on CircleID. more
RIPE NCC has announced plans to conduct live measurements for World IPv6 Day on 8th June 2011. The not-for-profit organization has set to measure connectivity to World IPv6 Day participants; "the IPv6 Eye Chart tests visibility of all World IPv6 Day participants and other sites that are already dual-stacked on a single web page." RIPE NCC says the process will help to find out if there are problems accessing these websites, both before and during World IPv6 Day. more
When did the Internet begin? It all gets a bit hazy after so many years, but by the early 1970s, research work in packet-switched networks was well underway, and while it wasn't running TCP at the time (the flag day when the ARPANET switched over to use TCP was not until 1 January 1983) but there was the base datagram internet protocol running in the early research ARPA network in the US. Given that this is now around 50 years ago, and given that so much has happened in the last 50 years, what does the next 50 years have in store? more
Now that IPv6 deployment is happening in major networks around the world, the question becomes -- what does "success" look like for IPv6? How much IPv6 traffic is "enough"? What are major milestones we should be tracking in IPv6 deployment? What is next for IPv6? more
In the last RIPE Labs article on this subject How Does the Internet Industry Compare?, we looked at ways to compare our industry with other industrial sectors, and identified a number of characteristics that an industry must have in order to be comparable to the Internet industry. It seems the financial sector or monetary credit industry shares many of these characteristics and in fact behaves much like the Internet industry. more