What Are We Waiting For?

A good reason to migrate! Sorry. I didn't mean to yell, but this is one of those points that I strive to make sure all my graduate students at Syracuse University's School of Information Studies understand completely. A technically elegant and brilliant solution to a nonexistent problem will not gain acceptance in the market. Conversely, a cheap and nasty product might gain broad commercial acceptance so long as it is sufficiently reliable and offers demonstrable value relative to the present method of operation. Just look at Ethernet.

Simply stated, the marketplace is predominated by commercial entities. The mission of these entities is to make money for their owners and/or stockholders. They are not in the business of chasing technology to enhance the satisfaction levels of their technical personnel. A new technology is embraced only when it offers value that enhances a company's ability to succeed.

IPv6 has been languishing for several years. Much ado was raised early on, and the new protocol was widely publicized and acclaimed. This publicity was largely driven by a sense of urgency that rivaled the later Y2K bug hysteria. The Internet was going to stop working because we were running out of addresses! Well, that made the value proposition clear. Companies had become so accustomed to using the Internet in support of their commercial operations that they couldn't just let it die.

With this motivation, the IETF set about developing the next generation of the Internet Protocol. Simultaneously, they chartered a number of teams to buy time by propping up IPv4 with stopgap mechanisms solely intended to make the existing address space last a little longer. These stopgap mechanisms, as you have seen throughout this book, have had a profound impact on the Internet address space. More importantly, these mechanisms offered long-term relief from the address shortage. The unintended result was that the motivation for migrating to IPv6 disappeared! Again, the market embraces a new technology only when doing so is in the market's best financial interest.

IPv6 Niches

The vast majority of North America seems content to just continue using IPv4, updating it as needed. IPv6, however, might find a receptive market in some regions of the world where the local allotment of IPv4 addresses is nearing depletion. For countries unable to obtain new address spaces, migrating to IPv6 might be the only solution.

Other nascent industries, too, might find IPv6 a better fit for their needs than IPv4. Wireless service providers might find some of the features of IPv6 perfect for their needs. Similarly, the Internet 2 is already up and running on IPv6. Of course, that's not a "production" network, and it can afford downtime and the less-than-perfect performance that often accompanies migrating to a "new" technology. However, you cannot deny that IPv6 is starting to diffuse throughout the world's base of internetworks.