Stakeholders Tell NTIA IPv4 Exhaustion Driving IPv6 Adoption, Tech Issues Hindering
IPv6 transition stakeholders said rapidly dwindling availability of IPv4 addresses is the top motivation for switching to IPv6 addresses. They also told NTIA in comments filed through Monday that uncertainty about benefits of upgrading and its costs are major impediments to adoption. In August, NTIA requested comment on factors influencing a move to IPv6 (see 1608180029). U.S. entities have made considerable progress in moving to longer IP addresses (see 1608310069).
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Stakeholders identified IoT and connected device proliferation as working in tandem with IPv4 depletion to drive IPv6 adoption. Connected devices and applications “will depend upon a direct IP connection, rather than being able to operate behind [network address translation] boxes or proxy servers,” AT&T said. “Companies, content providers and other entities that want to participate in this marketplace will ultimately have to migrate towards IPv6.” The secondary IPv4 market “is a stopgap measure,” Google said. “The secondary market can only redistribute the connectivity; it cannot increase it. For very large internal deployments, it is also possible to deplete the IPv4 private address space, so that adoption of IPv6 is needed to maintain connectivity among internal devices.”
Making the move “by a company in many cases is seen as purely a business decision,” said the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN). “Those interested in business continuity and growth must implement IPv6, if they have not done so already.” Rural carriers and broadband providers “must consider marketplace demands in order to justify the business decision to invest in transitioning to IPv6, and can only do so in accordance with available resources and funding,” NTCA said. “The need to make a justifiable business case is among the most important determinative factors.”
Microsoft identified government mandates as the “only credible customer forcing functions for adding IPv6 support.” Not all governments “have mandated IPv6, and of those that have, enforcement of the mandate differs from agency to agency,” it wrote. “Microsoft is not alone in that our engineering groups are justifiably cautious about such mandates, which may force changes to feature delivery priorities without delivering commensurate customer usage.” State governments have experienced “significant growth in the utilization of IP-enabled devices but this number is likely to remain stagnant unless there is a corresponding growth in the number of state users of said devices,” the National Association of State Chief Information Officers said. “State CIOs do anticipate another exponential growth in IP-enabled devices,” but data collected thus far indicates “that IoT policy development within state government remains immature.” It may take some state governments more than two years to “fully implement” IPv6, NASCIO said.
Expenses were repeatedly identified as a top obstacle to IPv6 adoption. Microsoft said it found as recently as 2014 “noteworthy price and support deltas from our equipment suppliers for IPv4 and IPv6 solutions." NTCA said it “may be difficult to justify the considerable expense, in staff time as well as capital, of moving to IPv6, as long as current and near-term customer needs are being met.”
Deployment “may be held up by the slow software update cycle of a single constituent component,” Google said. “Where the service’s implementation has been done in house or within the context of an open-source project, Google has some control over the effect. Outside of those contexts, we may depend on an external party.” Google said its peers’ networks “may not support IPv6 or may access Google via transit networks that do not provide IPv6 transit.” Older routers and switches “may stay in service until support for them is ended by the manufacturer,” Google said.
Running dual-stack service “requires more computer memory and central processing unit (CPU) capability than single stack,” AT&T said: “This problem is most evident in consumer devices,” which often “lack the processing power to manage both IPv6 and IPv4 simultaneously.” This problem “is exacerbated by the fact that new devices continue to be built that only support IPv4 and will not be capable of supporting IPv6 in the future due to hardware limitations,” AT&T said. “All players in the ecosystem will need to develop internal IPv6 expertise and to engage proactively in the broader Internet community to remain up to date.”
ARIN said a lack of IPv6-capable “feature parity with the IPv4 offerings provided by some hardware and software vendors” is a major obstacle. “Although many vendors have implemented IPv6 for their products, in some cases the features are not as complete for IPv6 as they are for their legacy IPv4-only products,” ARIN said. Continued availability of shorter addresses is causing problems, with some organizations indicating “they would never deploy IPv6 while IPv4 was still available from the Regional Internet Registries,” ARIN said.
VMWare noted a “lack of enterprise customer demand for deployments, on general lack of knowledge and perceived difficulty of migration. Organizations within certain industries and regions have more IP addresses allocated and believe they don't need to implement IPv6, VMWare said: “The ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ mindset is preventing IPv6 implementation.”