Latin America is likely to start seeing exhaustion of IPv4 addresses by the end of this year, Tom Siracusa, an executive director at AT&T Labs, told BNamericas.

According to the executive, Asia has already gone into its “final exhaust,” and other regions will follow soon.

This trend means that as new internet-connecting devices appear, especially in the mobile environment, they will be based on IPv6.

Siracusa works with companies helping them to create a migration strategy. The initial phase of that strategy focuses on making their internet-connecting servers and devices IPv6 compatible.

Siracusa encourages enterprises to establish what is known as a “dual stack connection” on their internet-facing environment, which means that servers can communicate in both IPv4 and IPv6 languages.

“Really it means it’s like their service becomes bilingual. To draw an analogy, if you speak to me in English I’ll speak back to you in English. If you speak to me in Portuguese or Spanish ideally you want me to speak back to you in that language, so the conversation end to end is clear communication,” he said.

As more and more companies have mobile workers that travel and need to connect remotely to the corporate network from different parts of the world, where IPv6 may start becoming predominant, those companies will need to ensure that their servers can speak to both IPv6 and IPv4 addresses.

After initially concentrating on the internet-facing environment, companies will later have to start addressing IPv6 for internal wireless area networks (WANs) and probably also implement dual stack environments.

“As you look at your internal WAN, you’re going to want your PC users and enterprise end-points to talk both languages,” Siracusa said. “Whether you’re going to go back and rewrite all of your applications to make sure they’re IPv6 compatible will vary from company to company.”

According to the executive, most companies are unlikely to rewrite all of their legacy applications due to cost, so he expects dual stack will last for a decade or more.

A company that decides to change abruptly to an all-IPv6 environment could be faced with a “Y2k” problem and have to go back and check that every legacy application can run over IPv6.

“If you remember with the Y2k scenario, if you had an application with a date field in it, the year might have been only two digits and now has to support a four-digit year,” Siracusa said. “In the migration to IPv6, it is really about the address field. The IPv4 address took up 32 bits, whereas the IPv6 address takes up 128 bits.”

ADVANTAGES OF IPV6

While the ability to address all the growth of new endpoints is the biggest short-term driver of migrating to IPv6, there are other advantages, according to Siracusa.

With the growth in machine-to-machine communications and peer-to-peer networking such as video conferencing and VoIP, sessions are created on either side of two endpoints.

The way a lot of enterprise architecture is set up today may prevent something on the internet from communicating with a device on an internal LAN, due to private addressing.

For example, a router can be set up in a home to create a private network to connect all of the family PCs. But the addresses of those devices are hidden behind the router using private addressing.

That changes with IPv6. The ability to have peer-to-peer networking and a direct line of communications between endpoints is going to enable a lot more applications to be written that could allow, for example, a refrigerator manufacture to connect to the fridge in your home, receive an alert when a filter needs to be replaced and then order it automatically, Siracusa said.

Why settle for this one story when you can access all our news? Sign up here for your free 15-day trial.

Similar Posts:

Share