Emerging Nations Seen Having Edge on IPv6 Transition
GENEVA -- Conversion cost is beginning to drive decisions on deploying IPv6, putting nations with emerging ICT infrastructures at a distinct advantage over developed countries, said officials attending an IPv6 meeting at the ITU here last week.
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It costs less and is easier to move to IPv6 in emerging economies than in developed nations, officials said. “Economically, if you can avoid transition, you're better off going directly to IPv6 today,” said John Klensin, a consultant speaking for the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
China may be the first nation to adopt IPv6, said Hequan Wu, leader of China’s Next Generation Internet Project. In China, 100 million users take up around 55 million IPv4 addresses, compared to 1.28 billion in the U.S. Although several hundred million addresses stand in reserve and Chinese requests for more IPv4 addresses have been met, the explosion in growth of mobile Internet access is driving the perceived need to switch -- and India is coming up too, officials said.
Of 300 million mobile handsets in China, 100 million can now access the web, making an IPv6 update indispensable, Wu said. Officials expect use to keep rising steeply. While the business case for adopting IPv6 has yet to be made clearly, the savings on switching sooner rather than later are becoming a market driver, officials said.
“If you're a country which has very little Internet infrastructure today relative to the amount of infrastructure you expect to have five years from now, then I think we've gotten to the stage where the conversion equation is clear. Conversion is expensive; it is harrowing. It results in user disruption. Even if we do it well, all those things happen. If I'm looking at an area in which I don’t have much deployment now and am expecting a lot of deployment within the next 4 to 5 years, I would deploy IPv6 now… because it would avoid those conversion costs completely,” said Klensin. The conversion to IPv6 is a complex problem for countries with developed ICT infrastructure: “We are going to have a terrible time weaning the U.S. off IPv4,” said Klensin, “because people have address space and they have big, complicated enterprise networks that are going to be hard to convert.”
Europe faces challenges too. Only 14 national IPv6 task forces exist, so 11 countries aren’t at the table, including Greece, Ireland, the Czech Republic, Baltic countries and Norway, officials said. Data from Portuguese ICT officials and industry representatives showed some lacked knowledge about and awareness of IPv6. Technical benefits were seen as limited, but technical and market barriers were perceived as high, officials said.
While IPv4 addresses remain abundant, they're perceived as scarce. “The most important address space we have is IPv4, and we should not touch it, because the remaining address space will be used for the transition, especially if it’s dual stack,” said Latif Ladid, pres. of the IPv6 Forum. Several hundred million IPv4 addresses remaining in reserve should be protected for the transition, officials said.
“For Egypt, IPv6 is more an opportunity than a challenge,” said Baher Esmat, chmn. of the Egypt IPv6 Task Force: While the transition to IPv6 won’t happen overnight, “IPv6 is not any more an exercise; it’s coming.” Latin America was moving quite fast to IPv6 as well, officials said.