Rocky road ahead for IPv6

By Steven J.Vaughan Nichols, ZDNet US, 24 April, 2002 11:03

Another problem, Khuon observes, is that "key vendors developing IPv6 implementation still were not offering as rich a feature set as they had with IPv4. An example of this is Cisco's IOS, which, when released as "IPv6 enabled" in the production images (12.2T) did not at first contain a sophisticated IPv6 Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP)." Since then, Cisco has addressed some of these issues, but IPv6 on IOS remains a work in progress. Some vendors, however, still don't support IPv6 at all. For example, no commercial version of MacOS supports it, and IPv6 is supported on Linux but still somewhat experimental. Even on Windows XP, IPv6 is a "preview" technology more suited for developers than users. Still, some people think that IPv6 may be on its way to prime time. Besides Microsoft's call for support, research house The Yankee Group predicts that by the fourth quarter of 2002, Japan will become the first country to deploy IPv6 in production environments. The reason? The Asia-Pacific region is suffering from a lack of available IPv4 addresses and Japan will take a leadership role in the implementation of this technology into production environments. That's in part because Japan has embraced 3G wireless phones, which require IPv6 for networking. Droms thinks that will happen here, too. "Wireless is going to push IPv4's address availability," he says. "We're just at a point where it's not possible to expand the address range with NAT and retain functionality for wireless devices." Khuon agrees. "I believe the mobile market will be the greatest pusher of IPv6," he says. "IPv6 was designed with IP mobility in mind. You can do IP mobility today with IPv4, but it's extremely convoluted. IPv6 makes it easier." And, eventually--but not as soon as many predicted--the rest of the current IPv4 network infrastructure.

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