[72attendees] IAB's Introduction to the Wed Technical Plenary

IAB's Introduction to the Wed Technical Plenary

This Wednesday night the IAB invites you to join us at the Technical Plenary
where we will hear first hand from 5 members of the Internet community who
have been embroiled in operational IPv6 deployments. They represent the
perspectives of RIR's, network operations teams, broadband services, content
delivery services, and Host Applications. They will share with us about
their IPv6 adoption successes, hurdles, and IPv4 depletion contingency
planning. There will be both moderated and open Q&A sessions.

Motivation & Background
------------------------
Studies suggest that the completion of IPv4 address allocations will occur
in the not too distant future. One example,
http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/ estimates that at the current rate IANA
will allocate its last block of addresses to the RIR's by February 2, 2011.

Regardless the exact date one expects, the concept of an empty storehouse
will change the networking landscape. In order to ready for that eventual
moment, various players are working towards wider IPv6 deployment.

Some content providers are planning ahead, working to ready their content
for IPv6 endpoint hits. This has recently become visible, and the volume of
work is mountainous. Some service providers and broadband providers see the
need, started some time ago, and are moving toward infrastructure and
service delivery that can/will run on IPv6. Both face a bit of a
chicken-and-egg problem: the content providers would move faster if they
knew the operators had the services fully baked to deliver IPv6 eyeballs to
the content. Meanwhile, the operators say they would invest more in their
IPv6 services and infrastructure deployments if the content the
end-customers demand was available and abundant. The two are interdependent;
one cannot be without the other.

Enterprises are, in some way, the swing vote. Objectively, few enterprises,
have moved to wide scale deployments of IPv6. Some have IPv6 pilots, a few
have partial deployments. Yet they may hit the v4 allocation cliff harder
than either the other two communities. This will leave them in a costly
scurry to react at the last minute.

IPv6 deployment in operational networks across the Internet is a work in
progress. Transition mechanisms have existed and been deployed for years,
including dual-stacks and various translation and tunneling mechanisms. Over
time, more hosts and networks are moving to native IPv6 operations.
Collectively, we now have several years of experience with both.

The IAB has established this plenary topic to provide some background  and
input from those experienced with deployments and issues in order to empower
the IETF community do its part to encourage and facilitate the  world-wide
deployment of IPv6.

We have a very full agenda (
https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/72/agenda.html) for Wednesday's
Technical Plenary, and will begin promptly at 17:00 in Convention 1 and 2,
just left of the IETF registration desk. We look forward to seeing you then.

Gregory Lebovitz
Wednesday's Panel Moderator,
on behalf of the IAB

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IETF related email from
Gregory M. Lebovitz
Juniper Networks