Subject: IETF72, IPv6 Panel Report

From: IAB Chair <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2008 02:01:10 -0700 (PDT)

[cross-post]

Dear Colleagues,

The IAB would like to thank all of you who attended or otherwise
participated at the IETF 72 Technical Plenary's panel on IPv6 adoption in
Dublin. We heard about IPv4 exhaustion contingency planning and about
real-world IPv6 adoption successes and barriers from:

- Mark Kosters (ARIN's perspective and policies about IPv4 address
  exhaustion)
- Alain Durand (Comcast's IPv6-enabled network infrastructure)
- Lorenzo Colitti (Google's IPv6-enabled content services)
- Shin Miyakawa (NTTcom's IPv6-enabled consumer services)
- Stuart Cheshire (Adoption of IPv6 in applications like Apple's Safari
  web browser)

Audio stream archive:
 http://limestone.uoregon.edu/ftp/pub/videolab/media/ietf72/
 Select "ietf72-ch3-wed-plenary.mp3".
 The IPv6 panel starts at time 01:13:00 on the stream.

Presentation archive:
 https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/72/materials.html
 See heading "Plenary Sessions", session "PlenaryW".

The consistent message from the presentations was that most of the code
implementation work for IPv6 is done -- the protocols have been designed,
and implemented in all major operating systems and networking devices.
Most widely-used software (like networking gear, OS software, and web
browser clients) has already been updated to support IPv6, and most
application software written to use higher-level "connect-by-name" APIs.
Popular development languages like Java get IPv6 support for free without
any code changes at all. However, the participants were clear that
although the actual operational deployment of IPv6 is much easier
technically than they expected, it takes longer than expected; they urged
the rest of the community to begin their deployment work as soon as
possible.

One common theme was that, as with many technological advances, success
stories in IPv6 adoption are frequently the result of one or two motivated
individuals who take the initiative to make things happen in their
organization. If you yourself have worked on "throwing the IPv6 switch"
within your organization, or you know of someone with an interesting IPv6
adoption story, the IAB invites you to let us know about it, including
issues overcome, or hurdles still before you. Send your story to:

  [email-masked]

The IAB will deliver a summary report on these stories at a future IETF
meeting.

On the universal deployment of IPv6[*],

-- For the IAB
  Olaf Kolkman

PS: Want to make a difference? A brainstorm of ideas follow:

 * Share the slides and a report of the plenary session with the
   networking lead in your organization's IT department.
 * Personally request IPv6 service from your ISP and enable IPv6
   for your home network.
 * Prepare your laptop for IPv6 and primarily use the IPv6 network
   at IETF 73.
 * If you work on application code, make sure your application works
   with IPv6, and if not, fix it. (Even if you don't test wide-area
   IPv6, at the very least make sure your application works with
   IPv6 link-local addresses, which are configured automatically
   these days on Mac OS X and Windows.)
 * Start using IPv6 operationally within your organization.

[*] There is an old tradition to toast on "the Universal Deployment of
IPv6" during the the IETF Scotch BOFs. With that in mind we plan to
provide the best story with a bottle of single malt.
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