Book #2
JULY 2015

EU-China FIRE

EU-CHINA FUTURE INTERNET COMMON ACTIVITIES AND OPPORTUNITIESIPv6BEST PRACTICES

EU-China FIRE is a EU-funded FP7 project, lasting two years (2013-2015), to strenghten EU-China cooperation
on IPv6 and Future Internet Research and Experimentation (FIRE) activities

CLOUD
EU-China FIRE

NFV
FUTURE
INTERNET

5G

IoT

MOBILE
INTERNET

IPv6

FIRE

SDN

CENI

EU-China FIRE : IPv6 Best Practices

EU-China FIRE

Project Acronym: ECIAO
Project Full Title: EU-CHINA future Internet common Activities and Opportunities
Grant Agreement: 610418
Project Duration: 24 months (August 2013 - July 2015)

D3.1v2:IPv6BestPractices

Deliverable Status: Final
File Name: ECIAO_D3.1v2-final.pdf
Due Date: M24
Submission Date: M24
Dissemination Level: Public
Author: UL (Latif Ladid latif.ladid@uni.lu);
BII (Davey Song @biigroup.cn), IPv6 Expert Group members© Copyright 2013-2015 The EU-China FIRE Consortium
Martel GMBH
Switzerland

China Academy of Telecommunication
Research of Ministry of Information Industry
China

Easy Global Market SAS
FranceSigma Orionis SA
FranceFujian Ruijie Networks CO LTD
China
BII Group Holdings LTD
China

Université du Luxembourg
Luxembourg

EU-China FIRE Project : IPv6 Best Practices • July 2015

2

CLOUD
EU-China FIRE

NFV
FUTURE
INTERNET

5G

IoT

MOBILE
INTERNET

IPv6

FIRE

SDN

CENI

EU-China FIRE : IPv6 Best Practices

Table
of
contents
Introduction............................................................................................................ 4
1 • Foreword IPv6 Roadmap.............................................................................. 5
2 • Current Deployment of IPv6....................................................................... 93 • Policy and Political Goodwill..................................................................... 25
4 • IPv6 Deployment Best Practices for Governments.......................... 38
5 • ETSI IPv6 Integration – Industry Specification Group...................... 45
6 • IPv6 Deployment in the Enterprise........................................................ 47
7 • IPv6-based 5G Mobile Wireless Internet.............................................. 52
Conclusion............................................................................................................. 57
Annexes.................................................................................................................. 58

EU-China FIRE Project : IPv6 Best Practices • July 2015

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CLOUD
EU-China FIRE

NFV
FUTURE
INTERNET

5G

IoT

MOBILE
INTERNET

IPv6

FIRE

SDN

CENI

EU-China FIRE : IPv6 Best Practices

Introduction

2015 seems to be another inflection year with the
ARIN announcement of its full exhaustion of theNorth American IPv4 address pool in July 2015.
IPv6 deployment seems to pick up new steam moving
forward consistently as the IPv4 address space isgetting scarcer at the Telecom and ISPs levels beyond
the Registries levels with some countries achieving
as of July 11th more than 20% user penetration with
Belgium (42.7%), USA (27%), Switzerland (26.5%) andGermany (21%) ranking at the top (http://labs.apnic.
net/dists/v6dcc.html).
Over 140 million users are accessing Internet over
IPv6 and are probably not aware of it. The US remains
by far the biggest adopter of IPv6 by tripling its figure
from 20 million users in July 2014 to some 78 million
users followed by Germany, Japan and China withover 10 million users. Many IPv6 emerging countries
have crossed the 1 million bar mark namely India, Brazil, Peru, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia. Some stagnant
countries which are leaders in IPv4 have some catchup to do namely Great Britain, Netherlands, Canada,
Australia, Spain, Russia and Italy. Overall, Europe isstill leading the IPv6 deployment making the strategic
and good will case for it, re-enforced now by the US
which drives everyone else in this global collaborative
effort similar to what happened to IPv4 deployment
in the 90s.
Many Autonomous Networks (ASN) reach more than
50% with IPv6 preferred or IPv6 capable penetration:(http://labs.apnic.net/ipv6-measurement/Economies/
US/).

Worldwide IPv6 access to Google has passed 6%
usage still showing the hockey-stick curve (http://
www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html).
If this trend continues, the APNIC statistics show that
we should achieve 50% IPv6 capable penetration by2017 which would be another inflection point when
the full roll-out of IPv6 becomes a strategic plumbing
decision for all networks, a topic that is avoided so far
due to many strategic and resource issues (lack of top
awareness and management decision-making, lack of
IPv6 skilled engineers and IPv6 operational and deployment best practices, very limited ISP IPv6 accessdeployment, and vendor push..).
The deployment of Carrier Grade NAT is in full swing
making networking and the user experience morebrittle than ever which could become another driverto return to simplicity in view of the emerging technologies such as SDN and NFV, which today makes atotal abstraction of the IP layer, another sanity checkdown the road. The security and cybersecurity issues
are always brushed over at this stage due mainly tothe lack of IPv6 security skills. New topics are morein the limelight such as Cloud Computing, Internet ofThings, SDN, NFV, Fog Computing and 5G. However,these fields are taking IP networking for granted bydesigning them on IPv4/NAT, building non-scalable
and non-end to end solutions. The ECIAO project isdriving new initiatives to garner support and createawareness and best practices on the impact of IPv6
on topics such as Cloud Computing, IoT, SDN-NFV and5G through the ETSI IPv6 Industry Specification Group(IP6 ISG) defining best practices and deployment guidelines with use cases and success stories.

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EU-China FIRE

IPv6 Roadmap

1 • IPv6 Roadmap
The Internet has shown its incredible potential as a unique economic enabler. The
ability to build networks between people, groups, data, and things – the all-embracing Internet of the Future will in the next 10 years, generate a value exceeding USD
14.4 trillion, touching all sectors of the economy. A world linked together by the“Internet of Everything” will turn raw information into knowledge, creativity into
practical innovation, and facts into greater relevance than ever before, providing
richer experiences and a more sustainable global economy.
We are not, however, there quite yet. Currently, 99.4 per cent of physical objects that
may one day be part of the “Internet of Everything” are still unconnected. Moreover, large
areas of the world remain unserved or underserved by Internet connections. Meanwhile,
recent technological developments in cloudcomputing, wireless networks, so-called “Big
Data”, high-performance computing, processing power, sensor miniaturisation, and manyothers, translate into a digital data universethat is increasing exponentially. The ability toeconomically extract value from this universe
will offer unprecedented opportunities forwelcome progress – if there is sufficient ability to connect to the growing Internet.
One of the key technologies that can enable
this progress is the new Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). This new iteration of the IP protocol stands poised to push the boundariesof the Internet beyond what is now possible
with the current version, IPv4. Moreover, IPv4
addresses are quite simply running out. IPv6
will allow users to get the most value fromthe “Internet of Everything”, and it will enable
greater connection of underserved communities and countries. Yet today, there are significant market, business, and technical challenges in making the transition from IPv4 to IPv6.
The world stands poised for a great leap overthose challenges and toward the possibilities
of an unbounded new Internet.

This roadmap explores the transition process and suggests ways to build momentum
for IPv6 around the world. Section 1 explores
some of the transition challenges, which include establishing a valuable business caseand accounting for transition costs. Sections
2 and 3 first explore the current status ofIPv4 and the progress of transition to IPv6. It
then seeks to break down the technical andeconomic factors, including costs that may be
impeding transition. Section 4 then explores
how governments, standards bodies, and international organisations can help foster theconditions to promote the take-up of IPv6
technology.
Section 5 outlines the best practices of IPv6
deployment in governments and Section 6
informs about the recently launched ETSI Industry Specification Group dealing with IPv6
integration in the key Future Internet technologies.
Section 7 outlines how the enterprise world
could deploy IPv6, an area to watch carefully
as we have very limited released information
about enterprises that have deployed IPv6
and Section 8 looks at the important emerging integration of 5G and IPv6. Finally, Section
9 concludes with a summary of actions andthe way forward.

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IPv6 Roadmap

Figure 1: Coping with Demand for Internet Addresses (Source: Geoff Huston, APNIC)

Perhaps the threshold question to address in explaining the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 is “why?” make thetransition to IPv6:• The costs entailed in IPv6 adoption;• The main roadblocks/challenges in deploying and transitioning to IPv6, such as a lack of business incentives
or consumer awareness, as well as technical incompatibility and security issues;• The existing policies, regulatory measures and guidelines developed to support the transition from IPv4 to IPv6;• The best practices and recommendations that can encourage, facilitate and support a swifter adoption of IPv6;• Potential innovative steps that policy-makers could take to accelerate or facilitate IPv6 deployment; and• Measures already taken by the ITU, industry, and governments to promote awareness of the criticality of
IPv6 deployment.
The following sections lay the groundwork for considering these issues by surveying the current status of IPv4
address deployment and the nascent transition to IPv6 as it stands today.

1. Status of IPv4: Preparing for the ‘IPocalypse’At full deployment, the total number of IPv4 addresses
that can be used from the 32-bit address space is 3.7
billion. At the outset, then, it becomes apparent that,in a world with more than 7 billion people, the existing addressing system inevitably will be tethered by ashort leash on the way to the “Internet of Everything”.

Moreover, the IP address system was not originallydesigned to distribute addresses by country. Rather,addresses were assigned to networks as they werebuilt (on a need-basis), giving a lion’s share to the earliest networks and users. These were mostly within
the U.S., which continues to have 42 per cent of IPv4
addresses. Asia now has around 20 per cent, which isfar better than the 9 per cent it had back in 20001.

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IPv6 Roadmap

Depletion of IPv4 Address SpaceThe number of IPv4 addresses available from thecentral, global Internet Assigned Numbers Authority(IANA2) registry is not simply low – it has been completely depleted as of 3rd February 2011. The remaining unclaimed IPv4 addresses are now in the careof Regional Internet Registries (RIRs), which have thetask of distributing them in their regions. The Internet
community has predicted this address exhaustion anddid not wait until the end in order to sound the bells
for deployment of IPv6. This gave the Internet community, ISPs, and enterprise users alike enough time
to better prepare for this transition. For example, The
RIPE community established its IPv6 Working Groupin 1997. At that time several industry partners, together with national research networks and other stakeholders already established a first IPv6 operational
network, called 6BONE, which was used to test IPv6
implementations and gain operational experience.
Several of the RIRs, including APNIC and the RIPE
NCC, have also been delivering IPv6 training courses
to their members for many years.
As time goes on, the depletion situation grows worse.
The global IPv4 supply shortfall is predicted to reach
800 million IP addresses by 2014, according to Geoff
Huston, Chief Scientist at APNIC, the Asian RIR3. APNIC and RIPE NCC have exhausted the addresses
provided to them by IANA since 15th April 2011 and14th September 2012, respectively. The North andSouth American RIR will be depleted by mid-2014.
Meanwhile, the yearly demand is increasing from 300
million to 350 million annually just for the baseline ISP
consumption to keep the normal growth of the Internet going. These numbers do not take into accountthe new needs for emerging IP-based services like the“Internet of Things,” Smart GRID efforts, and Smart
Cities, to name just a few.

How bad is the exhaustion situation? Well, the remaining address space among all five of the regional registries is about 5 blocks of 16 million IP addresses,
which is a total of 84 million. North America has only
2.5 blocks left. It is abundantly clear that the worldis facing an impending “IPocalypse”, and the only solution at hand designed by the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF4) over the past two decades to caterfor the growth and the scalability of Internet addressing is IPv6. The big shift to IPv6 will happen by default.
Increasingly, IPv4 addresses are kept viable onlyby the use of a stop-gap solution: the extension of
Network Address Translation (NAT) to the carrier level– a technique called Carrier Grade NAT (CGN) which
is currently in deployment on a large scale. CGN isbasically implementing NAT at the carrier network
and will not share a single IP address per many users
but rather certain ports among the same users will beshared. The Internet experience will be dramaticallyreduced because it will not be able to get even one
global IP address to link the NAT to the Internet. The
end-user will get just a certain number of ports. Applications like Google maps might need up to 250 ports;
anything less than that will make the map patchy orof poor quality.
Figure 2 illustrates the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses
as it plays out across the central (IANA) and regional(RIR) registries. The first (left) counter shows that thecentral pool has fully assigned its 256 IP blocks. The
second (right) counter shows the remaining IP blocks
per region at the registry level. Each block contains 16
million IP addresses. The RIR policy is that when the
RIR reaches the last IP block, it will only assign 1,024 IP
addresses, and only to those entities that will deploy
IPv6 -- at least for now in Asia and Europe.

Latif Ladid – stats from year 2000.
IANA is the department of ICANN, a nonprofit private US corporation, which oversees global IP address allocation, autonomous
system number allocation, root zone management in the Domain Name System (DNS), media types, and other Internet Protocolrelated symbols and numbers. See http://www.iana.org/about
3
APNIC (Asia Pacific Registry www.apinic.net)
4
IETF: http://www.ietf.org/
1
2

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IPv6 Roadmap

The Remaining IPv4 Address Space
By linking to the website for BGP (Border Gateway
Protocol)6, one can view the number of IP addresses
assigned to networks in every country of the world.
The numbers are generated from information published by the RIRs (AFRINIC for Africa, APNIC for Asia,
ARIN for North America, LACNIC Latin America, andthe Caribbean, and RIPE NCC for Europe, Middle Eastand parts of Central Asia) on their FTP servers as of 6thof July 2015.
Total number of IPv4 addresses:

Figure 2: The IPv4 address
exhaustion clock5

	
  

2^32:

4294967296

4294.97 million

Class D+E:

536870912

536.87 million

Nets 0 and 127:

33554432

33.55 million

RFC 1918:

17891328

17.89 million

Usable:3706650624

3706.65 million

The list of the countries shows certain historical disparities in the assignment of the address space. The
introduction of the registries has compensated to acertain extent in the past 20 years, helping contributeto a more balanced distribution of the IP addresses(though always on a need basis) and the promotion ofbalanced Internet policies through a bottom-up, community-defined consensus. Obviously, the need for
800 million IP addresses by 2014 and 2015 to sustain
the growth of the Internet as a global force remains
a critical issue to resolve. The only solutions are promoting IPv6 and training the community in good useof the remaining IPv4 address space during the transition period.

Figure 3: Distribution of IPv4 Address Space Worldwide(Source: BGP Expert)

5
6

Source: Netcore: http://inetcore.com/project/ipv4ec/index_en.html
BGP Expert (http://www.bgpexpert.com/addressespercountry.php )EU-China FIRE Project : IPv6 Best Practices • July 2015

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Current Deployment of IPv6

2 • Current Deployment
of IPv6
If we are in the middle of the IPocalypse, are we making any progress at deploying
IPv6 addresses? Industry statistics show that, in fact, IPv6 is entering the market at
a respectable pace. But will it be enough to meet the demand for Internet growth?

1. Growth of the IPv6 Connections
A chart found on the website of the Internet research organisation CAIDA7 shows that the number of IPv6 connections is increasing constantly worldwide. Europe leads with over 50 per centof the network connections, while there is also a strong showing in Asia, as well. A comparisonof the densely connected IPv4 universe to the IPv6 world demonstrates the high IPv6 readinessof the non-US based networks and the possible balancing factor of IPv6 services in the future.
Google, meanwhile, measures continuously the availability of IPv6 access among Google users.
The graph in Figure 4 shows the percentage of users accessing Google via IPv68.

Figure 4: Google IPv6 Users9
http://www.caida.org/research/topology/as_core_network/pics/ascore-2011-apr-ipv4v6-standalone-1600x876.png“Native” refers to equipment with IPv6 capability, in contrast with “dual stack” equipment that combines IPv6
technology with IPv4 capabilities.
9
Source Google: http://www.google.com/ipv6/statistics.html
78

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Current Deployment of IPv6

Google data shows that some 6.4% of the users are accessing Google over IPv6, with an exponential trend since
2012.
The following charts and analysis from Geoff Huston at APNIC show that Europe is leading the IPv6 user chart
while China shows some 6.3 million users not yet reaching 1% as of June 2015.
Index

Country

Internet Users

V6 Use ratio

V6 Users (Est)

Population

1

Belgium

9201276

42.92%

394941311193767

2

United States of America

282614477

26.57%

75098550

325218041

3

Switzerland

714554426.01%

18584808241689

4

Germany

71167014

21.11%

15020613

82560342

5

Peru12993754

17.58%

228388031160083

6

Luxembourg

51033716.45%

83940

5440707

Portugal

659152914.06%

926465106143808

Norway4886378

10.62%

5189285143556

9

Japan

109380868

10.36%

11326591

126891959

10

Greece6667800

10.24%

68271211131554

11

Malaysia

20555709

9.76%

200621630680163

12

Czech Republic

79923999.59%76645510785964

13

Estonia

1024068

8.97%

91827

1280085

14

Romania

10748476

8.09%

86978721583287

15

Finland49980717.56%

3780675462373

16

Singapore

41097317.30%

2999675629769

17

France54143952

6.32%

3421343

64998742

18

Ecuador12566714

5.27%

66259016236065

19

Austria

6897868

4.81%

3317308558150

20

Bolivia

4355868

4.40%

19169111027515

21

Saudi Arabia

19716043

3.98%

78473429918123

22

Netherlands

15838065

3.96%626591

16849006

23

Ireland

37041213.17%1175794730679

24

Bosnia and Herzegovina

2593405

2.78%

72153

3819449

25

Sweden91907102.60%

2393529694842

26

Australia

20806983

2.36%49041123943594

27

Brazil110439897

2.22%2450748203763648

28

Hungary7196392

1.36%

97603

9912386

29

New Zealand

3982072

1.34%

53399

4598236

30

Bhutan232590

1.26%

2930

77789631

Canada33981006

1.24%42124135882795

32

China

668901220

0.94%63025541402308638

33

Poland24846367

0.90%

22432738225180

34

Bulgaria

3776847

0.86%

32544

7112707

35

Russian Federation

87286773

0.73%

636876142160869

36

India

252795481

0.73%

1838770

1283225795

37

Taiwan18751419

0.71%

13336623439274

Figure 5: APNIC IPv6 users by country

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Current Deployment of IPv6

The IPv6 picture in Belgium is impressive, where almost one half of the users in Belgium are now IPv6 capable.
Similarly, the picture in the United States appears to be radically different from that of a year ago, with almost
one quarter of US users now on IPv6. Today some 30 countries now have IPv6 deployment rates in excess of 1%.
The full extent of the recent moves in the United States by Comcast, Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T, and Time WarnerCable in IPv6 are very impressive. When coupled with the efforts in Germany by Deutsche Telekom and Kabel
Deutschland and KDDI in Japan then the IPv6 results in these top three IPv6 countries outnumber all the others.
Country

Internet Users

V6 Use ratio

V6 Users (Est)

Population

Americas645043025

12.87%

83017439

991821843

Europe528043780

5.95%31423508

743533824

Asia

1565961282

1.46%22903270

4388155220

Africa297947062

0.08%

2234161167040514

Oceania

26302864

2.01%

52868739397499

World

3063298095

4.51%

138245886

7330037254

Figure 6: APNIC IPv6 users by Registry Continents

First, the statistics look different in 2015 as the number of worldwide Internet users has been updated from
2.3 billion users to 3.06 billion which has an impact on the percentage of IPv6 users going down from almost
9% in July 2014 to 4.5%. The massive jump in the US (23.5%) shows a 12.87 % IPv6 users in the Americas with
Europe about half of that total and Asia obviously less than half of Europe. Africa is in a serious need of a better
promotion and adoption strategy despite the very good work of AFRINIC’s core experts however, Africa withvery limited resources is the largest continent with some 54 countries.

Figure 7: Top 30 Access Providers by “network value”

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Current Deployment of IPv6

Geoff Huston remarked that Figure 7 is an interestingtable in a number of ways. The first is the extent of
aggregation in the access business in which just 30
access providers control some 43% of the total valueof the Internet’s access business. The second observation is that almost one third of these access providers
are actively deploying IPv6. And finally, these nine
IPv6-enabled access providers (% v6 value is greaterthan 0 as shown in Figure 7) account for almost 80%of the total IPv6 value.
So who is deploying IPv6? The specialised technicallyadroit ISP enthusiasts or the largest mainstream ISPs
on the Internet? Predominately, it’s the latter that’s
now driving IPv6 deployment. And that’s a new development.
For many years what we heard from the access provider sector was that they were unwilling to deploy IPv6
by themselves. They understood the network effectand were waiting to move on IPv6 when everyone
else was also moving on it. They wanted to move altogether and were willing to wait until that could happen. But that was then and this is now. I would beinterested to hear what today’s excuse is for inaction
from the same large scale access providers. Are they
still waiting? If so, then whom are they using as theirsignal for action? If you were waiting for the world’s
largest ISP by value, then Comcast has already taken
the decision and has almost one half of their customer base responding on IPv6 as shown in Figure 8.
Similarly if you were waiting for Europe’s largest ISP,
then Deutsche Telkom has already embarked on its
IPv6 deployment program. Overall, some 8% of thevalue of the Internet by this metric has now shiftedto dual stack mode through their deployment of IPv6,
and if just these nine IPv6-capable service providers
were to fully convert their entire customer base todual stack they would account for 16% of the total
value of the Internet.

I’d like to think that the waiting is now over. I’d like tothink that the balance of influence in the network is
now shifting to a norm of services that embraces IPv6
in a dual stack service model. We’ll keep measuring
this in the coming months and keep you informed.
Meanwhile the reports of IPv6 deployment on acountry by country basis and the level of detail of eachindividual network’s progress with IPv6 are updated
daily at http://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6.
The worldwide level of IPv6 adoption by ISPs reflects
the fact that as of March 2015, 18,099 IPv6 prefixes
have been allocated by the RIRs (Figure 9). Of those,
50% have been routed in the BGP table and 40% arealive on the routing table. This does not mean that
the ISPs are offering IPv6 service. Only a few do, so
far, but many have announced they are offering, orplanning to offer, IPv6 service during 2015 due to the
ARIN’s full exhaustion of IPv4 address space.

	
  Figure 8: List of Fixed and Mobile operators showing IPv6 traffic(Source: http://www.worldipv6launch.org/measurements/)

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Current Deployment of IPv6

Figure 9: IPv6 address assignment

The top 500 websites have been tested
for IPv6 connectivity, and 25.6% of themcan be accessed by default over IPv6
(shown in Figure 10). These top 500 web
sites produce 80 per cent of the world’s
hits and traffic; they are using IPv6 packets to send their content to the endusers accessing them via IPv6.

Figure 10: Performance Indicators:
500 Tested (Lars Eggert, IRTF Chair– IPv6
Deployment Trends – July 2015)	  Cisco has calculated (Figure11) that the global adoptionof IPv6 in the Internet core
backbone10 has reached59.16 per cent, with a global
content penetration of 35.82
per cent. The user penetration, however, is growing but
still very low at just 6.37 percent. This is primarily due tothe lack of IPv6 services offered by telecom and mobile
operators.

	
  Figure 11: Global IPv6 adoption (Source: Cisco: http://6lab.cisco.com/stats/ )

	
  
11

http://6lab.cisco.com/stats/

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Current Deployment of IPv6

2. Worldwide Vendor Readiness
Back in 2004, the IPv6 Forum introduced a logo programme dubbed “IPv6 Ready”. The goal was to create aworldwide interoperability scheme to urge vendors to accelerate adoption of IPv6 based on real, interoperable
compliance testing and validation. Due to the complexity and worldwide scope of this task, a committee wasformed to represent the breadth of interoperability labs from around the world: the Japanese TAHI team; theUS-based UNH-IOL lab; the European-based IRISA/ETSI; the Taiwan, Republic of China TWINIC; and the Chinese
BII lab. Their task was to collectively design the interoperability specifications and test scripts for worldwide
execution. The adoption of this programme was an immediate success and vendors from around the world
took the tests to check on their products (Figure 12).

Figure 12: IPv6 Ready Logo Program (GOLD)A large number of Asian vendors have adopted IPv6in their routers and security solutions (IPsec). An important development to note is the entry of a large
number of new vendors from China and Taiwan (Republic of China) and India, joining the large participation of U.S. and Japanese vendors. Remarkably, there
is almost a non-existence of European vendors. The
number of products certified as IPv6 ready is spreadamong vendors primarily from among the following
countries:

•
•
•
•
•
•
•

United States: from 233 in 2011 to 588 in July 2015
Japan: from 122 to 389
Taiwan, Republic of China: from 117 to 367
China: from 67 to 258
South Korea: from 6 to 104
India: from 0 to 36
Europe total: from 16 to 37

http://www.ipv6forum.com/
www.ipv6ready.org
13
http://tahi.org/
14
https://www.iol.unh.edu/services/testing/ipv6/
15
http://www.irisa.fr/tipi/wiki/doku.php
16
http://interop.ipv6.org.tw/17
http://www.biigroup.com/
1112

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Current Deployment of IPv6

EU-China FIRE

Following Table 1 shows the evolution of the IPv6 Ready products by countries examinedand successfully passed the tests:
M/Y-C

CN

TW

JP

KR

US

IN

CA

DE

DK

FR

Jun-05

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

Dec-05

7

23

89

17

28

3

1

1

1

1

Jun-06

10

26

106

28

33

4

1

2

2

Dec-06

17

41

133

31

44

8

2

2

Jun-07

25

49

147

33

53

8

4

Dec-07

26

57

166

43

66

9

Jun-08

29

73

188

51

87

Dec-08

36

76

212

58

Jun-09

47

85

230

Dec-0952

96

Jun-10

NZ

IT

UK

PH

TH

SE

BE

IL

CZ

AT

AU

ES

FI

GB

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

8

0

0

0

0

2

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

1

8

0

0

1

0

2

0

0

0

1

0

0

0

0

2

2

8

0

0

1

0

2

0

0

0

1

0

0

0

0

2

2

2

8

0

0

1

0

2

0

0

0

1

0

0

0

0

4

3

2

2

8

0

0

1

0

2

0

0

0

1

0

0

0

0

9

4

3

2

2

8

0

0

1

0

2

0

0

0

1

0

0

0

0

120

11

4

3

2

2

8

1

0

1

1

3

0

0

0

1

0

0

0

0

64

166

11

4

3

2

3

8

1

0

1

2

3

0

0

0

1

0

0

0

0

246

65

190

11

4

3

2

3

8

1

0

1

2

3

0

0

0

1

0

0

0

0

65

109 261

65

224

13

4

3

2

3

8

1

0

1

2

3

0

0

0

1

0

0

0

0

Dec-1073

124 281

66

240

14

4

3

2

3

13

1

1

2

2

3

0

0

0

1

0

0

0

0

Jun-11

86

155 295

75

293

19

4

4

2

3

13

1

1

3

2

3

0

0

0

1

0

0

0

0

Dec-1188

171 305

76

326

23

6

4

2

6

13

1

1

4

2

3

0

0

0

1

0

0

0

0

Jun-1299

202 328

86

360

25

6

7

2

6

13

1

1

4

2

3

0

0

0

1

1

0

1

0

Dec-12111 234 339

88

388

26

6

11

2

10

13

2

1

5

2

3

0

0

0

1

1

1

1

0

Jun-13

121 263 350

89

415

31

6

13

2

10

13

2

1

5

2

4

0

0

0

1

1

1

1

0

Dec-13160 298 359

92

453

33

6

14

2

11

16

3

2

5

2

5

1

1

0

1

1

1

1

0

Jun-14

193 326 370

93

483

33

6

14

2

11

16

3

3

5

2

5

4

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

Dec-14

209 331 380

95

508

34

6

14

2

11

16

3

3

5

2

5

4

2

2

1

1

1

1

1

Jun-15

234 343 387

99

556

36

6

14

2

11

16

3

3

5

2

5

4

2

2

1

1

1

1

1

July 15258 367 389 104 588

36

6

14

2

11

16

3

3

5

2

5

4

3

3

1

1

1

1

1

Table 1: IPv6 Ready Products products by countries

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Current Deployment of IPv6

3. Building the Business Case for IPv6 Adoption
Unfortunately, defining the business case for IPv6 has
been a rather challenging task. IPv6 stands ready torevitalise the growth and use of networking and theInternet as a platform for commerce, education, entertainment, and general information sharing. However, at the end of the day, it is still seen as just communication “plumbing”. The market has long looked
to IPv6 to deliver the next “killer applications” when,in reality; IPv6 is just a tool, albeit a critical one, in thedevelopment of new applications and network-based
services. This reality, combined with most businesses’
short-term perspective on return-on-investment (ROI)
and quarterly earnings, have created a reluctance toinvest in upgrading Internet infrastructure to IPv6,
most notably in North America and Europe.
Another impediment to IPv6 adoption has been oneof the Internet IPv6 community’s own making: extolling the virtues of IPv6 primarily from a technical perspective. While IPv6 offers a number of technologicaladvancements, such as a larger address space, auto-

configuration, a more robust security model for thepeer-to-peer environment, and better mobility support, these features have been offered in a technology vacuum that has not resonated with big business.
Both business and government leaders are concerned about how problems are resolved, how revenue
is generated, or how to build efficiencies and costsavings into their organisation. IPv6 certainly has theability to help deliver these scenarios, but the focus of
the story needs to be on the solution – not the technology that helps deliver that solution.
The Internet IPv6 community may need to motivate
industry by developing appealing and compellingbusiness-case justifications that focus on solutions
built with and upon IPv6. To that end, IPv6 should beplaced in context as a solutions tool and a foundation for innovation. In short, the discussion should be
about IPv6 as a key to greater business or organisational success, not as a mythical quest for its own sake.

IPv6 as a Solutions Tool
Organisations utilise information technology every
day to solve business problems. The adoption of
networking technologies to facilitate communications,conduct financial transactions, and or exchange information has been quite successful in boosting productivity and operational efficiency. But there is growing
evidence that these gains have been pushed to theirlimits with current technology. Ignoring for a moment
the issue of impending IPv4 address exhaustion, thelimited volume of addresses has short-changed technology advancements in areas like “any-casting,” multicasting, or peer-to-peer exchanges. Most advanced
network support features like security and quality ofservice which were afterthoughts are not part of theoriginal design of IP. As a consequence, the standards
bodies and industry have provided solutions that ex-tended the capabilities of the network, but also drastically increased the complexity of the network andcreated additional problems.
Today, organisations are finding it increasingly moredifficult to deploy new, cost-effective IT solutions thatare simple to support.
As a simple example, let’s examine a Business to Business (B2B) relationship between an organisation andits partners. Each organisation must participate inbusiness processes. This requires great coordination,
extra equipment, and constant management and thisrepresents just one of hundreds of ways IPv6 can beused to solve “real world” problems that add value tothe organisation AND improve return-on-investment.

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IPv6 as a Foundation for Innovation
IPv6 has several advantages over its predecessor, including a larger and more diverse address space, built-in
scalability, and the power to support a more robust end-to-end (i.e., without NAT) security paradigm. As such,it serves as a powerful foundation for the creation of new and improved net-centric sets of products and services. This list is by no means exhaustive, but it does highlight a number of very promising technologies forwhich IPv6 can provide an important boost for further expansion:• Ubiquitous Communications – with increases in the number of mobile phone users, the expansion of Internet-related services through cellular networks, and an increasing number of connection mediums (UMTS,
LTE, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, UWB, etc.), there is a need for a uniform communications protocol that supports mobility
and can handle a large number of devices.
• Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)/Multimedia Services – VoIP has been making excellent progress from atechnology-adoption perspective. A move from ITU-T Recommendation H.323 to Session Initiation Protocol(SIP) has enabled more robust VoIP implementations with a greater level of simplicity and expandability.
• Social Networks – People interact but the form in which they do this has changed drastically over the years– from written letters, to phone calls, to e-mails, to SMS and IM messages. That evolution continues today.
The ability to transfer photos, conduct conversations in private Peer to Peer (P2P) transfers, display personal
information on the Internet, find like-minded communities, or play interactive games requires an Internetthat is flexible, supports ad-hoc connections, and can be secured. IPv6, with its auto-configuration capabilities and support for IPsec at the IP stack layer, will be a critical tool to enable this environment.
• Sensor Networks – Sensor networks are a new concept. They can be found in manufacturing equipment, heavy machinery, security systems, and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems. Sensors are building
blocks for integrating all of those proprietary systems onto one communications network, which then must
be protected through security features. IPv6 provides technical improvements to achieve this more readily.
• Product Tethering/Communities of Interest - Manufactures love to have relationships with their products
once they leave the factory. But the current reality is that most consumer electronic goods producers havelittle, if any, interaction with the end users of their products. In a world where all things can be connected,
the opportunities to monitor and troubleshoot performance, update software and market new, value-added
services to existing customers are almost endless.

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Making the Business Case to Vendors
A recent study released by Ericsson
predicts that 50 billion devices will beconnected to the Internet by 2020, dwarfing the scale and scope of the current
Internet and the mobile worlds. Mobility
will play a greater role in the future, as
the enabler of the Internet of Things.
For its part, Cisco has recently released
a study on the “Internet of Everything”,
making the business case for a USD 14.4
trillion market, by 2022, for networking
basically everything.

Figure 13: Cisco business case for Networking with IPv6

So the opportunity exists with IPv6 for those willing toconsider the protocol as a tool for defining solutions
for existing business problems, and as a platform forinnovation for next-generation products and services.
How, then, can industry continue the groundswell for
IPv6 integration?
First, there is still a need to understand IPv6 and its
features, and most importantly, how those features
map to potential networking problems. Although the
IPv6 Community has provided all manner of educational opportunities for industry, there remains a deficitin coordinated efforts to increase IPv6 awareness at
three levels:• Strategic planning at the corporate level,• Improved return-on-investment (RoI), and• Technical knowledge at a tactical level.

To achieve a measure of success, the IPv6 Community
needs to follow this basic strategy:• Generate an interest in business solutions at
the CEO/CTO level. Stories about the virtues of auto-configuration and the power of IPsec EH shouldbe left at the door to the boardroom. Solutions thatfix business problems or build competitive advantages are more compelling. The fact that IPv6 is theglue that makes those solutions function should beicing, not the cake. Once the business solutions are“sold”, IPv6 will become part of the long term strategies of these organisations.
• Create a framework for return on investment
to justify sound decision-making. Providing executives with the framework for an ROI improvement model will expedite this process.
• Solutions sold at the CEO/COO level will needcompetent engineering and architecture todeliver. This requires formalised education andknowledge transfer, and CEO/COO level of executives needs to understand and support this process.

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Current Deployment of IPv6

4. Addressing the Cost of IPv6 Transition
One of the key hurdles in formulating a business case for IPv6 adoption is the perception of costs versus benefits. The potential costs associated with deploying IPv6 consist of a mixture of hardware, software, labour, andmiscellaneous costs. The transition to IPv6 is not analogous to turning on a light switch; instead, many different
paths can be taken to varying levels of IPv6 deployment. Each organisation or user throughout the Internet
supply chain will incur some costs to transition to IPv6, primarily in the form of labour and capital expenditures,
which are required to integrate IPv6 capabilities into existing networks.
Expenditures and support activities will vary greatly across and within stakeholder groups depending on their
existing infrastructure and IPv6-related needs. By and large, ISPs offering services to large groups of customers
will likely incur the largest transition costs per organisation, while independent users will bear little, if any, costs.

Breaking Down the Cost Factors
Factors influencing these costs include:• Type of Internet use or type of service being offered by each organisation;• Transition mechanism(s) that the organisation intends to implement (e.g., tunnelling, dual-stack, translation,
or a combination);• Organisation-specific pattern of infrastructure, which comprises servers, routers, firewalls, billing systems,
and standard and customised network-enabled software applications;• Level of security required during the transition; and• Timing of the transition.

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Table 2 provides a list of relative costs that may be incurred by stakeholder group and gives a percentage
breakdown by cost category.

Transition Cost Breakdown
Key Factors in
Bearing Costs

Stakeholders

Relative Cost

HW

SW

Labor Timing Issues

Hardware Vendors

Lowb

10%

10%

80%

Currently most are
Rolling in IPv6 as aproviding IPv6 capabilities standard R&D expense;
international interest andfuture profits incentivise
investments

Software Vendors

Low / Mediumc

10%

10%

80%

Currently some are
Interoperability issues
providing IPv6 capabilities could increase costs

Internet Users (large) Medium

10%

20%

70%

Very few currently using
IPv6; HW and SW will
become capable asroutine upgrade; enabling
cost should decreaseover time

Users will wait forsignificantly lower
enablement costs or(more probably) a killer
application requiring
IPv6 for end-to-end
functionality before
enabling

Internet Users(small)

Low

30%

40%

30%

Availability and adoption
schedules

With little money to spare,these users must see aclear return on investment(ROI)

Internet Service
Providers (ISPs)

Highd

15%

15%

70%

Very few offering IPv6
service; no demandcurrently; very high costcurrently to upgrade
major capabilities

ISPs see low or nonexistent ROI, high costs,
and high risk

Table 2: Transition cost breakdown
Source: RTI estimates based on RFC responses, discussions with industry stakeholders, and an extensive literature review.
These costs are estimates based on conversations with numerous stakeholders and industry experts. Several assumptions underlie them. First, it is assumed that IPv6 is not enabled (or “turned on”) or included in products and no IPv6 service is offered until it
makes business sense for each stakeholder group. Hardware and software costs are one-time costs. Labour costs could continue
for as long as the transition period and possibly longer.
a

For hardware vendors producing high-volume parts that require changes to application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC), thecosts could be very high and would not be offered until the market is willing to pay.
b

Software developers of operating systems will incur a relatively low cost; however, application developers will incur greater relative costs, designated as medium.
c

The relative cost for ISPs is particularly high if the ISP manages equipment at user sites, because premises equipment is morecostly to manage and maintain.
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Table 3 provides an item-by-item list of the costs to deploy IPv6 by stakeholder group. This is a relative comparisonof costs and should not be interpreted as representing the actual size of each stakeholder group’s cost. Furthermore, small Internet users (e.g., home and small businesses) are not captured in Table 3 because they will likely
incur virtually no costs. Small Internet users will receive software upgrades (e.g., operating systems and email
software) as new versions are purchased, that their IPv4-only hardware (e.g., routers and modems) will be replaced
over time as part of normal upgrade expenditures, and that IPv6 will eventually be provided at no additional cost.
Hardware, Software,
Service Providers

Item

ISPs

Enterprise Users

HardwareReplace interfacing cards

H

Replace routing/forwarding engine(s)

M

b

M
M

Replace chassis (if line cards will not fit)

M

M

Replace firewall

M

M

Upgrade network monitoring/management software

H

H

Upgrade operating system

M

H

SoftwareUpgrade applicationscServers (Web, DNS, file transfer protocol (FTP), mail, music,
video. etc.)

L

Enterprise resource planning software (e.g., PeopleSoft,
Oracle, SAP, etc.)

H

Other organisation-specific, network-enabled applications

H

Labor
R&D

M

L

Train networking/IT employees

H

H

H

Design IPv6 transition strategy and a network vision

M

H

M/H

Install and configure any new hardware

L

H

H

Configure transition technique (e.g., tunneling, dual-stack,
NAT-port address translation

M

M

M

Upgrade software (see Software section above)

L/M

L/M

Extensive test before "going live" with IPv6 services

H

H

Maintain new system

M/H

M/H

Implement transition:

Other
IPv6 address blocks

L

Lost employee productivity dSecurity intrusions eH

HForeign activities

M

M

Interoperability issues

M/H

M/H

Table 3: Relative Costs of IPv6 Deployment by Stakeholder Group
Source: RTI estimates based on RFC responses, discussions with industry stakeholders, and a literature review.
The relative designation (L = low, M = medium, and H = high)indicates the estimated level of cost to members of each stakeholder group. These costs are not incremental, but reflect differences in costs between stakeholder groups. The blank spaces
indicate that a particular cost category does not affect all stakeholder groups.
aThe “brains” of the router are commonly found on line cards.
Portions of the first column, principally relating to software
upgrades by hardware, software, service providers, is blankbecause the costs of these activities are reflected in the corresponding categories in the “Enterprise Users” column.
dBecause of unexpected down-time during transition period.
eBased on unfamiliar threats.
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Breaking Down the Cost Factors
This section takes a closer look at costs by breaking them down according to the various entities that may incur them.

Hardware, Software and Service
Vendors
Vendors that provide products and services include:
networking hardware companies, such as router andfirewall manufacturers; networking software companies, including operating system and database management application developers; and service vendors,
including companies that offer training, service, andsupport. Obviously, these companies will need tointegrate IPv6 capabilities into their products andservices, if they have not already done so, in orderfor IPv6 capabilities to be available to end users and
ISPs. Once IPv6-capable products are installed in user
networks and their labour forces have been trained,
ISPs will be enabled to offer IPv6 service, and users will
be able to purchase IPv6-enabled devices and applications. Many companies in this category are alreadydeveloping, and some are even selling, IPv6-capableproducts and services largely because of demand outside the United States (e.g., Asia).
The majority of the costs being incurred by hardware and software developers appear to include labour-intensive research and development (R&D) andtraining costs. These costs, however, have not been
large enough to deter most of those companies frombeginning to develop IPv6 products and capabilities.
R&D activity has generally been conducted in small
intra-company groups dedicated to developing IPv6capable products with, to date, limited, small-scaleinteroperability testing with other hardware andsoftware makers. Based on industry experience withthe early deployments of IPv4 equipment, large-scale
deployment may bring to light additional interoperability issues.

ISPs
ISPs comprise two main categories: (1) companies(e.g., AOL, Earthlink, and myriad smaller companies)that provide Internet access service to corporate,
governmental, non-profit, and independent Internet
users and (2) companies that own and maintain the
backbone hardware and software of the Internet (e.g.,
Verizon, Sprint, AT&T). The categories overlap because
companies that own the backbone Internet infrastructure (i.e., Category 2 companies) often provide
Internet access service to customers, either directlyor through a subsidiary. Today, most backbone transport networks have already upgraded their majorrouters and routing software to accommodate IPv6.
As a result, providing IPv6 connectivity to customers
who do not require additional equipment, service, or
support will be relatively low-cost. Consequently, thisanalysis focuses on those ISPs in Category 1 that havelarge customer service provision capabilities.
These ISPs will likely incur relatively high transition
costs as they enable IPv6-capable hardware andsoftware and work through system interoperability problems. To date, however, little demand has
appeared in the United States for IPv6 services or applications. As a result, given the costs to reconfigure
networks, experts and industry stakeholders agree
that U.S. ISPs are currently not positioned to realisea positive return on investment from large-scale offerings of IPv6 service.
For Category 1, in order for ISPs to offer a limited
amount of IPv6 service, they would need to integrate
some transition mechanism(s), such as tunnelling.
The costs of doing so will probably not be large. If
several routers and service provisioning software areupgraded and limited testing is performed, IPv6 service could be provided to a limited number of Internet
users today at minimal additional cost.

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Current Deployment of IPv6

Internet Users

Hardware Costs

Costs to upgrade to IPv6 for Internet users vary
greatly. Independent Internet users, including residential users and small and medium enterprises(SMEs) that do not operate servers or any major database software, will need to upgrade only networking software (e.g., operating systems), one or more
small routers, and any existing firewalls to gain IPv6
capabilities. This cost will be relatively minimal if the
hardware and software are acquired through routine
upgrades.

Depending on individual networks and the level of
IPv6 use, some hardware units can become IPv6-capable via software upgrades. However, to realise thefull benefits of IPv6, most IPv4-based network hardware will need to be upgraded with IPv6 capabilities. Specifically, high-end routers, switches, memory,and firewalls all will need to be upgraded to provide
the memory and processing needed to enable large
scale IPv6 use within a network at an acceptable level of performance. It is generally agreed that to reduce hardware costs, all or the majority of hardware
should be upgraded to have IPv6 capabilities as partof the normal upgrade cycle (generally occurring every three to five years for most routers and servers, but
potentially longer for other hardware such as mainframes). At that time, IPv6 capabilities should be available and included in standard hardware versions.
In the short term, replacement of some forwarding
devices and software could be used to set up smallscale IPv6 networks.

Larger organisations, such as corporations, government agencies, and non-profits, will incur considerably more costs than home or small network users.
The relative level of these costs, however, will dependon existing network infrastructure and administrative
policies across organisations, the extent to which a
specific organisation wants to operate IPv6 applications, and whether it intends to connect to other organisations using IPv6.
The magnitude of the transition costs is still uncertain
because only a few test beds and universities havemade large-scale transitions. According to officials
at Internet2,18 the time and effort needed to transition their backbone to IPv6 was minimal, and no significant system problems have been encountered.
However, Internet2 indicated that their experimental
system was implemented and maintained by leadingindustry experts. It is unclear what issues might arise
from implementation by less-experienced staff. If
normal upgrade cycles are assumed to provide IPv6
capabilities, transition costs will be limited to training
and some reconfiguration.

Breaking Down the Costs by TypeInternet users, as a whole, constitute the largest stakeholder group. The robustness and diversity within thisgroup demands a more detailed explanation of costs
broken out by hardware, software, labour, and othercost categories.

18

Software Costs
Significant software upgrades will be necessary forIPv6 use; however, similar to hardware costs, manyof these costs will be negligible if IPv6 capabilities
are part of the routine requirements in periodic
software upgrades. Software upgrades include server software, server and desktop operating systems,
business-to-business (B2B) software, networked database software, network administration tools, andany other organisation-specific network-enabledapplications. Currently, the main software costs thatuser organisations envision pertain to element management, network management, and operations support systems that are often network-specific and willneed revised software coding to adjust for IPv6. Given
the anticipated growth in IPv6-capable software, it islikely that if Internet users upgrade their commercial
application software in three or four years, they will
acquire IPv6 capabilities. However, they will still need
to upgrade their company-specific software.

Internet2 (a US Research network: http://www.internet2.edu/)

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Labour Costs

Bridging the IPv6 Chasm

According to experts, training costs are likely to be
one of the most significant upgrade costs, althoughmost view it as a one-time cost that could be spreadout over several years. The magnitude of these training costs will, of course, depend on existing staff’s
familiarity and facility with IPv6. On a daily basis, thechange in operating procedure for IPv6 will be minimal. Most network staff, however, will need someunderstanding of the required network infrastructurechanges and how they might affect security or interoperability. The North American IPv6 Task Force19
notes that the relative programming skills of software
engineers at a particular company could substantially affect upgrade costs. A company with more skilful programmers might have to hire one additional
employee, while another might need three or four,
during a transition period that could last five or more
years. Additionally, increased network maintenancecosts following IPv6 implementation could be more
pronounced, depending on the relative level of IT staff
skills and technical understanding. Similarly, training
costs should be minimal for large organisations withexisting IPv6 expertise (e.g., universities).

As stated at the beginning, the business case has
been the Achilles’ heel of IPv6. The focus for many businesses in the Internet and Telecom sectors is, andalways has been, squarely on squeezing maximum
revenues out of current infrastructure. Since IPv6 isviewed primarily as a long-term plumbing problem,
many organisations and businesses are reluctant totear open the walls, even if IPv6 represents the best
investment and solution. Unlike the Year 2000 bug(Y2K), there is no ‘big bang’ date at which IPv4 address
space will run out; thus there is no perceived urgency
in transitioning to IPv6 deployment while ISPs canstill take revenue from IPv4 deployment. The choice
between an immediate deployment and a gradualtechnology refresh is fairly obvious depending on thesize of the address space allocated to the region inquestion.
The deployment of IPv6 is a challenge that can be called the “IPv6 Chasm.” While the technology is maturing, ISPs and enterprise customers are currently still
stuck between the research and validation phase andfull-scale deployment. The lack of IPv4 address spacein Asia has accelerated the deployment in that region.
Until recently, Europe and the United States hadenough address space to take their time, but in thelast 12 months, that has changed, and those regions
have now begun to see the urgency as well.
Section 4 explores the ability of inter-governmentalorganisations, multi-stakeholder groups and governments to help set a policy framework to accelerate
IPv6 deployment, building a potential bridge acrossthe chasm.

19

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Policy and Political Goodwill

3 • Policy and
Political Goodwill
Over the past decade, IPv6 has enjoyed remarkable support from governments andindustry standards bodies. Government policy-makers have established plans andpromoted policies to help ensure that there is sufficient awareness of the need totransition to IPv6, and regulators have played a role by establishing the frameworks
for network compatibility and interconnection, among other things. Industry groups
have established the technical standards for IPv6 and also have elevated the level ofemphasis on implementation. All of this has helped cement the concept that IPv6 is
simply not a passing technology or “trend”, but truly the foundation for the next-generation Internet. The list below identifies just a few examples of how governments,
including regulators, and industry bodies have helped to promote IPv6 usage:• 3GPP20 mandated exclusive use of IPv6 forIMS (IP Multimedia Subsystems) back in
May 2000;• Large mobile operators such as Verizon
and T-Mobile have introduced IPv6 in 4G-LTE (Long Term Evolution) service;• The United States Department of Defence

mandated the integration of IPv6 in June
2003, to be ready by 2008;• In June 2005, the U.S. White House Officeof Management (OMB) set a milestone forfederal agencies to use IPv6 by June 2008;• The European Space Agency has declared
its support for IPv6 in testing its networks;• The Japanese ITS project and the European
Car-2-Car consortium21 recommended exclusive use of IPv6 for its future car2car applications;• The Chinese government created and fi-

nancially supports CNGI, an IPv6 backbone
network designed to be the core of China’s
Internet infrastructure; and• The European Committee for Electrotech-nical Standardisation (CENELEC) has opted
for IPv6 for its Smart Home concept.22

These represent just a few of the numerous
examples in which IPv6 has garnered major
support from a government body or an industry consortium. In the case of governments,
aggressive IPv6 adoption curves have pushedindustry, particularly those vendors supporting or interacting with the government, towork toward IPv6 adoption themselves. So,
winning the political endorsement and goodwill can be a plausible and a viable route toaccelerate acceptance and adoption of IPv6.
This section explores the interwoven roles
that can be played in promoting IPv6 adoption by:• Inter-governmental and international nongovernmental organisations,• Standards bodies and advocacy groups, and• Government ministers and regulators.
The role of the government in the adoption of
the new Internet protocol is a continuation of
the adoption of the Internet as a whole. Governments have designed Internet promotion plansin the past for e-Government, e-Commerce,
and e-Health, enabling use of the Internet asa ubiquitous service platform. The broadband
Internet policies promoted are the next level ofextending better service to the users.

3GPP: www.3gpp.org
Car 2 Car Consortium: http://www.car-to-car.org
22
http://ar.groups.yahoo.com/group/IEEEAR-SA/message/5
20
21

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1. Global IPv6 Initiatives
Intergovernmental organisations have a role to play in developing a global framework and consensus for adoption of IPv6. This section examines that role and the activities that organisations such as ITU already haveundertaken to foster IPv6 adoption.

IPv6 and the Role of the ITU
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has
taken action, in various forums, to encourage capacity-building for deployment of IPv6 and the seamless
transition from IPv4 to IPv6. Recent actions include:• World Telecommunication Standardisation
Assembly (WTSA) Resolution 64 – Revised at
WTSA-12, this resolution urges continued cooperation between ITU-T and ITU-D to assist developing
countries with IPv6 transition efforts, including
through a website and by assisting in establishingtest beds and training activities.
• ITU Plenipotentiary Resolution 180 – Adopted in2010 in Guadalajara, Mexico, this resolution urges
efforts to facilitate the transition from IPv4 to IPv6.
• ITU Council – The Council established an IPv6 working group in 2009.
• World Telecommunication Development Conference, Resolution 63 -- Adopted in Hyderabad in
2010, the resolution encourages the deployment
of IPv6 in the developing countries and requests
that the Telecommunication Development Bureau(BDT) develop guidelines for migration to, and deployment of IPv6. BDT also was asked to collaborate closely with relevant entities to provide humancapacity-development, training, and other assistance.
Most recently, two related opinions were considered and adopted at the World Telecommunication
Policy Forum (WTPF) held on 14th – 16th May 2013
in Geneva. Opinion 3 (“Supporting Capacity Building
for the Deployment of IPv6”) called for “every effort”
to be made to “encourage and facilitate” the IPv6transition. More specifically, it indicated that if remaining IPv4 addresses are exchanged among RIRs,
these transfers should be based on a need for new
addresses and should be equitable among all of the
RIRs. Turning to sector members, Opinion 3 urged
companies to deploy equipment with IPv6 capabilities as soon as possible.

Similarly, WTPF-13 Opinion 4 (“In Support of IPv6
Adoption and Transition from IPv4”) urged governments to take “appropriate measures to encourage,
facilitate, and support the fastest possible adoption
and migration to IPv6”. Meanwhile, it noted that IPv4
addresses would still be needed for some time andrecommended efforts to ensure “optimal use” ofthose addresses. Plans and policies should be in place
to accommodate new ISP market entrants that needaccess to IPv4 addresses at affordable prices. Bothopinions took note of a trend toward marketing IPv4
addresses for trading purposes, and Opinion 4 specifically indicated that such transfers should be reported to the relevant RIRs.
Meanwhile, ITU-T’s Study Group 16 conducted atranscontinental IPTV experiment over IPv6 infrastructure in February 2012. After this experiment, andupon requests from ITU membership, a global IPTV
IPv6 test bed was set up among several ITU members,connecting ITU headquarters and countries such as
Japan and Singapore. The purpose was to test interoperability of IPTV equipment and services, as wellas other IPv6-based technologies. Another goal wasto promote IPv6 capability deployment in developing
countries. This test bed was updated for a second
transcontinental IPTV experiment showcased in February 2013. BDT is involved in many activities related
to IPv6, under PP10 Res. 180, for the adoption of IPv6.
Through these and other actions, the ITU can be seen
in a largely supportive role, both in expressing the policy consensus of its members and in facilitating realworld pilot projects. ITU has sought to advise governments and encourage industry to move forward with
the IPv6 transition in a seamless and timely manner,
but it has not attempted to mandate any particulartransition pathway. This reflects the reality of the Internet addressing system as a decentralised and largely need-driven one.

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The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)The OECD has been instrumental in researching and measuring the extent of deployment of IPv6 technology.
In a 2010 report,23 the OECD noted the challenge for expanding the Internet without completing the transition
to IPv6. This challenge is partly technical:
For technical reasons, IPv6 is not directly backwards compatible with IPv4 and consequently, the technicaltransition from IPv4 to IPv6 is complex. If a device can implement both IPv4 and IPv6 network layer stacks,
the “dual-stack” transition mechanism enables the co-existence of IPv4 and IPv6. For isolated IPv6 devices
to communicate with one another, IPv6 over IPv4 “tunnelling” mechanisms can be set up. Finally, for IPv6only devices to communicate with IPv4-only devices, an intermediate device must “translate” between IPv4
and IPv6. All three mechanisms of dual-stack, tunnelling, and translation require access to some quantityof IPv4 addresses.24
Moreover, the OECD report, which continued a series of previous reports on IPv6, noted that “adequate adoption of IPv6 cannot yet be demonstrated by the measurements explored in this report. In particular, IPv6 is
not being deployed sufficiently rapidly to intercept the estimated IPv4 exhaustion date.”25 The report issued aclarion call for greater cooperation between government and industry and for increasing government commitments to IPv6 deployment.

The Role of Standards Bodies and Multi-stakeholder Groups
While ITU has adopted a stance of promoting and encouraging IPv6 transition (and frugal use of remaining
IPv4 addresses), much of the technical work to ease
the transition has been addressed by standards bodies and other “multi-stakeholder” groups. As with allelements of Internet governance, these groups havebeen instrumental in developing and implementing
the technical standards needed for open and widespread adoption of IPv6.
The Internet address space is considered to be a primary function of Internet governance in many partsof the world, especially in the North American, AsiaPacific and European regions where Internet early
adoption drove a de-centralised, technically oriented,
and non-governmental approach. Because of thisheritage, policy-makers in these regions often see
the “multi-stakeholder model” that has typified Internet governance as the best means to rapidly engage
industry and civil society in the development of technical standards. Proponents of the multi-stakeholder
approach are often wary of efforts by governments
and inter-governmental organisations (IGOs) to in-crease their influence over Internet governance, in
general (including IPv4 and IPv6 transition issues).
For their part, some critics of the multi-stakeholder
model argue that the existing groups have not managed to broaden access to include participationfrom developing countries and (to some extent) nonmanufacturing interests. The result has been a global
debate over how to balance the roles of multi-stakeholder groups with those of governments and IGOs.
This debate likely will continue during this decade,even as the IPv6 transition continues under the current governance architecture.
Table 4 provides a representational listing of someof the major multi-stakeholder groups and standards bodies that have key roles in Internet addressing. Many of these groups are playing key roles in
the IPv6 transition process, often by working withgovernments and IGOs. The chart notes the general
type of organisation (i.e., whether its main role is toprovide a forum for standards-setting, Internet governance or policy advocacy), and its role in the IPv6transition process.

See “Internet Addressing: Measuring Deployment of IPv6,” OECD, April 2010 at http://www.oecd.org/internet/ieconomy/44953210.pdf
Ibid, p. 6
25
Ibid, p. 5.
23

24

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Name of Organisation

Type of Organisation

IPv6 Role and Activities

Standards Bodies
European Telecommunications Standards
Institute (ETSI)The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)

Standardisation Body
Standards, Engineering

Interoperability Testing
IPv6 Ready Logo ProgrammeSole IP designer of IPv6

Internet Governance & Advocacy Groups
Repeated and consistent support
International Chamber of Commerce (ICC)

Advocacy Groupfor IPv6 transition
Identified measurements of IPv6
deployment.

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names
and Numbers (ICANN)/ Internet Assigned

Internet Governance

Numbers Authority (IANA)
Internet Governance Forum (IGF)

Advocacy, Policy Discussion

Internet Society (ISOC)

Advocacy, Policy Discussion

RIPE NCC

RIR for Europe 26

ARIN

RIR for North America

APNIC

RIR for Asia

Added IPv6 addresses for 6 of theworld’s 13 root server networks.
Has held workshops to address IPv6transition issues
World IPv6 Day, 2011
World IPv6 Launch Day, 2012
Portal IPv6 ActNow
High IPv6 allocation countBegan aggressive rollout plan in
2007
Monitors and supports IPv6
deployment in the Asia-PacificregionOffers IPv6 transition support,

AFRINICRIR for Africafeaturing training materials and test
beds

RIR for Latin America and

LACNIC

the Caribbean

European Network and Information Security
Agency (ENISA)

Maintains a portal in 3 languages(Spanish, Portuguese, English) as a
one-stop IPv6 resource
Centre of Excellence for European

Advocacy, Policy Discussion

States on network and information
security

Table 4: Standard Bodies and Multi-Stakeholder Organisations
26

Regional Internet Registry

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The Role of National Governments and Regulators
Government policy-makers and regulators have notbeen passive in promoting efforts to build capacity,
deploy infrastructure and urge the adoption of IPv6.
Regulators have had a foundational role in ensuringthat regulations governing licensing, interconnection,and numbering resources are aligned with efforts topromote the transition to IPv6. Regulatory agencies
have at times cited a need to maintain a “light-handed” or “light-touch” regulatory stance towards Internet
addressing, emphasising the development of regulations for a competitive and affordable Internet accessmarket that would promote demand.27 Governments
have, however, taken some specific steps to promoteawareness of the need to utilise IPv6 to expand Internet resources. Key elements of governmental action
have included:• Establishing or supporting national IPv6 transition
task forces (often in conjunction with multi-stakeholder groups or RIRs);• Establishing national “roadmaps” with benchmarks
and timetables for IPv6 deployment;• Mandating that government agencies adopt IPv6
technology for their networks, websites or services;• Promoting the use of IPv6 in government-fundededucational, science and research networks; and• Promoting overall awareness of the transition
through setting up websites, hosting workshops orforums, and setting up training programmes.
As a long-time tech leader in East Asia, Japan has
sought to position itself as a model for planning inthis area. The Japanese Government has designed its
latest program around the concept of ubiquity called“u-Japan” (Ubiquitous Japan) as the 2010 ICT Society
platform. The e-government component of this planencourages government agencies to procure IPv6enabled devices; the infrastructure of the Japanese

government has been IPv6-ready since 2007. Similarly, the Republic of Korea has unveiled its new IT sector development strategy, dubbed “IT839,” seeking
to build on efforts in the previous decade to embed
IPv6 in e-government services and the networks ofthe postal service, universities, schools, the defence
ministry and local governments. In some cases, governments are devoting large budget outlays to support their national roadmaps. For example, Taiwan,
Republic of China, has announced a USD 1 billion
budget for its “eTaiwan” programme, which entails
a concerted joint effort between government andindustry. The goal is to reach 6 million broadband
users of IPv6 technology.
Indonesia developed a comprehensive, phased national plan and roadmap, beginning in 2006. The
first phase involved generating awareness of IPv6,
establishing an implementation model that included
a first-stage native IPv6 network, and developing abroad-based national policy. Meanwhile, Indonesia
made a commitment to participate in global efforts
to shape the development of IPv6, as well as policies
on Internet governance and standards activities. Additional phases called for development of further infrastructure and training to accelerate the transition
process to IPv6.
Regional approaches have proved to be helpful in several parts of the world. For example, some 29 countries
and territories formed the Latin American and Caribbean IPv6 Task Force (LACIPv6TH) under the auspicesof LACNIC. This regional task force has held forums on
IPv6 transition in more than a dozen countries around
Latin America and the Caribbean, from Mexico andthe Netherlands Antilles down to Brazil and Uruguay.
Among other things, the task force developed an IPv6
portal to assist as data and information resources inthe transition throughout the region.

See, for example, the consultation paper published by the Information and Communications Technology Authority (ICTA) of
Mauritius, 17 March 2011, at http://www.icta.mu/documents/Consultation_IPv6.pdf
27

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The Arab region and Africa have also worked to shareexpertise on a regional basis. The Arab group formed
an IPv6 Forum to spotlight individual countries’ efforts:• In Jordan, the IPv6 Forum chapter has held seminars with multiple stakeholders (including ISPs) topromote awareness and offer technical assistance;• The United Arab Emirates has formulated an IPv6
roadmap and in March 2013 held two workshops toprepare the UAE and its Internet stakeholders forlooming IPv4 depletion;• The Omani Telecommunications Regulatory Authority is taking the lead in promoting IPv6 transition, including by beginning to test implementationin conjunction with operators. Saudi Arabia adopted a clear strategy to move towards IPv6 in 2008
through establishing the National IPv6 Taskforce,developing awareness and capacity building plans,and starting implementation of programs aimed atraising the readiness of large enterprises to start
the transition to IPv6.

• The Egyptian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology formed a national IPv6 task
force;• The Moroccan regulator ANRT has commissioned
an IPv6 study to define a roadmap and is discussing
a calendar for IPv6 deployment with the country’s
main telecom operators;

The following Table 5 summarises the various countries that had a National IPv6 Regulator Policy:

Table 5: National Regulators IPv6 Deployment Roadmaps.

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The RIPE NCC/MENOG28 IPv6 Roadshow is a very good
capacity building initiative to be simulated for otherregions. The IPv6 Roadshow is a technical training
program, developed by RIPE NCC and APNIC and organised together with the Middle East Network Operators Group (MENOG). These are 3 or 5 day technicaltrainings, organised throughout the Arab region withthe purpose of training network engineers, who workfor public sector and enterprise, to deploy and operate IPv6 based networks and services.

of public services with IPv6 and integration of IPv6
into agency Enterprise Architecture efforts, as wellas capital planning and security processes. NIST has
established a website to track the agencies’ progressin meeting milestones. The European Commission,
meanwhile, has spent more than EUR 100 million on
research projects and awareness/outreach efforts,
forming the European IPv6 Task Force for coordination. Individual member states have their own efforts,
including:In Africa, the RIR and AFRINIC, has an aggressive training program that has trained some 450 engineers annually across the continent. The IPv6 address spaceand core network deployment has been particularly
successful in South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria,
Tunisia, and Senegal.

Spain – the GEN6 programme is developing pilot projects to integrate IPv6 into government operations
and cross-border services to address emergency response or EU citizens’ migration issues.

These efforts in developing countries largely track theefforts in the early-adopting Internet countries of Europe and North America. The United States government’s Federal IPv6 task force has worked with the
National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST)
to make public several versions of a roadmap andrecommendations, including 100 per cent enabling

Luxembourg – the Luxembourg IPv6 Council has defined a roadmap; the main telecom operator has followed through with offering IPv6 over fibre and published practical steps on implementation for otheroperators.
Germany – the government has obtained a sizable
IPv6 prefix from the RIR to completely enable its online citizen services infrastructure with IPv6

2. Case Studies
This section contains case study examples of the approaches to IPv6 transition planned and implemented inseveral representative countries.

India’s IPv6 Promotion Policy
The Telecom Regulations Authority of India (TRAI) has
released a consultation paper on issues related to thetransition from IPv4 to IPv6 in India.29

next generation Internet protocol, i.e., IPv6 is seen as
one solution for this; in addition, it is claiming to provide better security, QoS, and mobility support.

The Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of India’s (TRAI’s) recommendations on accelerating growthof Internet and Broadband served as the basis for the
National Broadband Policy 2004, issued by Government. To achieve targets of this policy, the Internet
and Broadband connections would require large supply of IP addresses, which may not be easily available
through the present version of Internet, i.e., IPv4. The

In the recommendations on Broadband, the need forfurther analysis and discussion on transition to IPv6
was recognised due to anticipated growth of Internet
and Broadband connections. Meanwhile, the Government of India has already constituted a group, called
the IPv6 Implementation Group (IPIG), to speed up
and facilitate the adoption of IPv6 in the country.

28
29

MENOG: The Middle East Network Operators Group: https://www.facebook.com/menog.org
TRA IPv6 Consultation paper: http://www.trai.gov.in/WriteReaddata/ConsultationPaper/Document/IPV6.pdf

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The Indian Department of Telecommunications (DoT)
released the government’s National IPv6 Deployment
Roadmap in July 2010, updating it in 2013. The result is aset of “recommendations” (many of them are mandatory) for government entities, equipment manufacturers,
content/applications providers and service providers.
Government organisations are required to prepare adetailed plan for transition to dual stack IPv6 infrastructure by December 2017. All new IP-based services, including cloud computing or datacentre services, should
immediately support dual stack IPv6. Public interfacesof all government services should be able to support
IPv6 by no later than the 1st January 2015. Government procurements should shift to IPv6-ready equipment and networks with IPv6- supporting applications.
Finally, government agencies will have to develop human resource (i.e., training) programmes to integrate
IPv6 knowledge over a period of one to three years, andIPv6 skills will be included in technical course curricula
at schools and technical institutes around India.
Service providers will have a role to play in the country’s IPv6 transition, as well. After 1st January 2014,
all new enterprise customer connections (wireless
and wireline) will have to be capable of carrying IPv6
traffic, either on dual-stack or native IPv6 network
infrastructure. Service providers will be urged to advise and promote the switch-over to existing customers, as well. Meanwhile, the roadmap sets aggressive
timelines for retail customers. All new wireline retailconnections will have to be IPv6-capable after 30th
June 2014. All new GSM or CDMA wireless connec-

tions will have to meet the same deadline, and all new
wireless LTE connections will have to comply a year
earlier. There will also be goals for transitioning existing wireline customers, culminating in the upgrade of
all customer premises equipment by the end of 2017.
The target for new website content and applications
to adopt IPv6 (at least dual stack) was 30th June 2014,
with even pre-existing content and apps converted by
the following January. India’s financial services industry (including banks and insurance companies) transitioned to IPv6 by no later than 30th June 2013. All new
registrations of the “.in” national domain are IPv6 (dualstack) by the beginning of 2014, with full migration of
the domain completed by the middle of that year.
On the equipment side, all mobile phones, data card
dongles and other mobile terminals sold for 2.5 G(GSM/CDMA) or higher technology were sold with
IPv6 capability (either dual stack or native) after 30th
June 2014. And all wireline customer premises equipment sold after 1st January 2014 has met the same
criteria. Finally, all public cloud computing/datacentre
services have targeted adoption of IPv6 capabilities by
the middle of 2014.
The Indian plan provides an example of aggressive
government mandates and targets for IPv6 transition,
extending across a broad swathe of the Indian Internet sector. It will be interesting to see if the strategy
precipitates a “critical mass” of demand for IPv6 capability that, in turn, generates industry reaction to market solutions for the updated protocol.

Australia
Australia’s IPv6 Forum Downunder,30 in a range of activities coordinated by the IPv6 Special Interest Groupof Internet Society Australia, has shifted the focus tobusiness and implementation benefits flowing fromadoption of IPv6. These activities have fostered a national discussion of IPv6 that has been accepted by
the National ICT Industry Alliance.31
In 2005, the Forum had taken the idea of promoting
a national discussion of the business and transition
processes for IPv6 to the National ICT Industry Alliance32 (NICTIA). As a result, Australia began a processof IPv6 Summits, led by consortia of the leading Australian IT trade bodies and endorsed by global IPv6

Forum. Year by year, these summits have focused onawareness, business case and transition issues.
Now there are lead IPv6 adoption sectors in Australia,
including research & education, defence and government. The largest high speed education network inAustralia (the Australian Academic Research Network- AARNet) began implementation with a testbed network, and has now implemented native IPv6 transports and provides IPv4 to IPv6 transition mechanisms for its member and affiliates. The Australian
Department of defence announced the adoption of
IPv6 in a programme that extended through 2013.
30

www.ipv6forum.org.au, 31 www.nitcia.org.au, 32 www.nictia.org.au

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More recently, the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) announced a transition strategy for the whole Australian government
with a target completion date of 2015.33 AGIMO’s rolein the government’s implementation of IPv6 includes
developing the IPv6 Transition Strategy and Work
Plan documents, monitoring and reporting on agencies’ progress, knowledge sharing, and monitoring in-

ternational trends. There are 110 agencies, as namedin Australia’s Financial Management and Accountability Act (FMA Act), rolling out IPv6 capabilities, including most of the major departments (Defence, Foreign
Affairs and Trade, Human Services, Finance and Deregulation, etc.). But the scope also takes in more specialised agencies such as the organ/tissue donation
authority and the sports anti-doping agency.

Canada34
The Government of Canada (GC) IPv6 adoption strategy consists of a phased approach to progressively
enable IPv6, while continuing to support IPv4. The
strategy begins at the perimeter of the GC networkand moves progressively toward the centre of the network. It is a business-focused approach designed tominimise cost and risk. The strategy leverages SSC’s
enterprise network renewal initiative and the regularequipment and software refresh cycles.
Business partners and entrepreneurs from emerging
economies who, in the future, may only have IPv6 Internet service will be able to access GC websites to dobusiness and research. Canadian citizens travelling or
living abroad and non-Canadians who may have access to IPv6 networks only will be able to access GC
web services for example, to access their personal
income tax information through the Canada Revenue
Agency or to apply for a student or work visa throughCitizenship and Immigration Canada.

Enabling Phase: The first phase was completed by
the end of September 2013. The goal enabled federal
organisations to achieve their individual plans for the
adoption of IPv6. Actions achieved for this phase included:• Developed IPv6 architecture standards and technical requirements;• Established governance bodies to oversee adoption, including a Steering Committee and a Community of Practice;• Created a change management strategy, including
policies, training, and communications; and• Enabled IPv6 connectivity for Internet-facing websites through a shared service.
Deployment Phase: The second phase focused on
the IPv6 enablement of the principal GC externallyfacing websites and was completed by the end of
March 2015.

Canadian public servants will be able to:

Actions implemented for this phase included:• Access the GC network in Canada to perform theirwork duties when posted or travelling abroad in an
IPv6-only region;• Enabled principal-existing GC Internet-facing websites to be accessible by IPv6 users;• Exchange electronic documents with business partners for goods crossing our borders, when thesebusiness partners are located in an IPv6-only region;• Conduct GC business with other governments located in IPv6-only regions; and• Access websites connected to IPv6 networks to doresearch.
The GC IPv6 adoption strategy comprises three phases:
Enabling Phase, Deployment Phase, and Completion Phase.
33
34• Required all new Internet-facing websites and applications put in place starting April 2015 to be IPv6enabled; and• Provided public servants transparent access to the
public IPv6 Internet.
Completion Phase: The third phase will focus on expanding the IPv6 enablement of GC websites beyond
the principal websites addressed in the Deployment
Phase and, as necessary, this phase will focus on enabling IPv6 access to GC internal applications. This phaseis expected to take a number of years to complete.

http://www.ipv6.org.au/summit/talks/JohnHillier_AGIMO_IPv6Summit12.pdf
http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/it-ti/ipv6/ipv603-eng.asp

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Saudi Arabia
The IPv6 Task Force Forum evolved from the outcomeof the IPv6 Project that was introduced by the Communications and Information Technology Commission as part of the Internet Services Development
Projects undertaken by the CITC.35 The Commission
sponsored the establishment of the Task Force thatconvened its first meeting on July 30th, 2008. The IPv6
Strategy for Saudi Arabia identified a set of milestones
to be achieved within a phased timeline via an action
plan of initiatives categorised into two tracks: Infrastructure and Awareness. Meeting the milestones facilitated the deployment and further penetration of
IPv6 on a nationwide basis so as to eventually realisean IPv6 ready internet infrastructure in the Kingdomof Saudi Arabia.
The milestones and action plan initiatives were basedon assessments and benchmark studies performed
by CITC as part of its effort to develop the Internet
in Saudi Arabia. The studies assessed the IPv6 statusquo and readiness of local stakeholders, extracted
lessons from a comprehensive IPv6 benchmark studyof eleven countries and stated the status of IPv6 inrelevant international bodies and organisations. The
IPv6 Strategy for Saudi Arabia objectives were a set ofhigh level goals to be achieved for the purpose of setting up the right environment to promote the deployment of IPv6 nationwide.
The identified objectives were:• Prepared for the IPv4 exhaustion by supporting IPv6and ensure stability, business continuity and room
for continued growth of the internet in Saudi Arabia;

The IPv6 Strategy followed a two (2) track approachthat addressed Infrastructure and Awareness aspectsof IPv6 adoption. It achieved tremendous progress indeveloping a roadmap deployment commitment for
Saudi Arabia with probably the most advanced IPv6
strategy in the Arab region.36
CITC embarked on the “Promotion of IPv6 Deployment in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Project” following the first IPv6 project activities undertaken in 2008
– 2009 that resulted in the first IPv6 Strategy for Saudi
Arabia as well as the establishment of the IPv6 Task
Force.
While the previous IPv6 activities focused on service
providers, this IPv6 project focused on adoption byenterprises. The project aims at continuing the success of the previous IPv6 activities and taking practical steps to promote the deployment of IPv6 in theKingdom, reaching the level of implementing a set ofpilot projects at selected enterprises that will provide
showcases for all Internet stakeholders to emulate.
The project aimed at benchmarking the status of IPv6
deployment in the Kingdom against international
trends and addressing regulatory and technical aspects of the Internet ecosystem which could affect thesmooth adoption and deployment of IPv6 in the Kingdom. A set of IPv6 guidelines and procedures weredeveloped to also cover this project.
Figure 14 provides a summary of some of the objectives that the Saudi Arabian plan has met to-date.

• Ensured a smooth adoption of IPv6 by stakeholders
so as to minimise risks;• Raised overall IPv6 awareness nationwide by approaching stakeholders of both the public and private sectors highlighting the necessity to adopt IPv6.

35
36

http://www.ipv6.org.sa/about
http://www.ipv6.sa/strategy%20

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Figure 14: Saudi Arabia IPv6 Task Force Achievements

The following Table 6 summarises the various main countries that had an IPv6 Policy:

Table 6: Goverments IPv6 Deployment Roadmaps

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3. Policy Recommendations
Despite the long-term commitment made evident by
IGOs, industry/multi-stakeholder organisations andgovernments, all parties should consider whether thecurrent activities and timelines are sufficient to alleviate the pressure on IPv4 addresses and spur transition to IPv6. Policy-makers and other stakeholders
should consider following concrete recommendations
as part of a call to action to enable IPv6 as follows:• Create a CEO IPv6 Round Table with recognised industry leaders, focusing on industry adoption andurging the major players to include adopting IPv6 intheir strategy plans. Select the target markets thatare likely to be impacted first with the time-to-market in mind.
• Formulate a top-line strategic IPv6 Roadmap as a
guideline.
• Increase support for the integration of IPv4 and IPv6
in fixed and mobile Broadband networks and services associated with the public sector:• The integration of IPv6 into e-government, elearning and e-health services, and applications
will offer users greater reliability, enhanced security and privacy, and user friendliness.
• IPv6 future-proofing should be considered in procurements, especially considering that the life
cycles of public networks are often longer thancommercial counterparts.
• Establish and launch IPv6 competence centres andeducational programmes on IPv6 techniques, tools,
and applications, to significantly improve the qualityof training on IPv6 at the professional level and create the required base of skills and knowledge.
• A mixture of academic and commercial expertiseshould be drawn upon for the centres; university and academic sites may be among the early
adopters and thus have key expertise.
• A model has been created by the IPv6 Forumcalled the IPv6 Education Logo Program37 which
was adopted by the Cisco Learning Network.38• Promote the adoption of IPv6 through awarenessraising campaigns and co-operative research activities, focusing on small and medium-size enterprises,
ISPs and wireless service providers and operators.
• Organise IPv6 competition or contests similar to theGerman IPv6 Apps Contest39 or the Singapore IPv6
Competition for Students.40• Strengthen financial support for national and regional research networks, with a view to enhancing their integration into worldwide networks andincreasing the operational experience with services
and applications based on the use of IPv6.
• Provide the required incentives for development,
trials and testing of native IPv6 products, tools, services and applications in economic sectors suchas consumer electronics, telecommunications, ITequipment manufacturing, etc.
• Include IPv6 criteria in procurement guidelines for
new equipment and applications for the public sector.
• Require universities to add IPv6 to the curricula forgraduate degree programmes, in order to ensure
the next generation of network engineers is IPv6
trained.
• Promote use of open source technologies for implementation of IPv6.41• Support the existing national IPv6 Task Force, or
create one, tasking it with:• The assessment of current status of IPv6 deployment, as well as with the formulation of guidelinesand dissemination of best practises relating to theefficient transition towards IPv6.
• Developing measures to align IPv6 integration
schedules, favouring cohesive IPv6 deployment
and ensuring that the nation can gain a competitive advantage in rolling out next-generation Internet networks and services.
• Ensuring the active participation of national experts in the work of developing international
standards, policies and specifications on IPv6-related matters, working with groups such as ETSI,
3GPP, IETF, ITU-T and the RIRs.

http://www.ipv6forum.com/ipv6_education/
Cisco Learning Network: https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/docs/DOC-10327
39
German IPv6 Contest: http://www.ipv6council.de/contest2011/vertikal_menu/winners/
40
Singapore IPv6 Contest: http://ipv6competition.com/index.html
41
See http://www.bieringer.de/linux/IPv6
37
38

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Policy and Political Goodwill• Drawing the attention of potential IPv6 systems or application developers to funding opportunities available at a national or regional level.
• Conducting an “IPv6 Launch Day” in the country.
• Establishing collaboration arrangements and working relationships with similar initiatives being launchedin other world regions, with a view toward aligning IPv6 work.
• Organise a high-level conference or summit aimed at raising IPv6 awareness, its development status andperspectives, its economic and policy dimensions, and the actions required to consolidate and harmoniseinternational efforts.
• Encourage deployment of new security and firewall modes using IPv6, combined with the use of Public Key
Infrastructure (PKI). Promote the development of secure networking applications and environments throughtrials, deployment, and use of IPv6 IPsec protocols.

Figure 15: Core IPv6 Policy Recommendations

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4 • IPv6 Deployment Best
Practices for Governments

42

1. Introduction

2. Things to consider

There is nothing more important in the contemporary world than to be a step ahead. On
the contrary, regressing one step behind cancause serious problems.

On the following pages, facts and observations
happening around IT, services and networks
are listed, however, are often being neglected,
pushed to the future or even being feared. The
common belief is the issue is coming from theprovider or there is still enough time before it
will affect my business. Whether one is an individual or belongs to the economical or government sector does not change the issue.

The Internet and nearly all local computer networks make use of the Internet Protocol. Due tothe success and the penetration of the Internet
in nearly every part of modern life, the initiallyused Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) is runningout of address space. In Europe, the Internet
registry ran out of IPv4 address blocks in February 2012. The Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6)
was developed to counter this shortage and offers more addresses identifying endpoints.
Network providers with a growing customer
base are forced to use the Internet Protocol
version 6 (IPv6) to get new customers connected. Connecting ever more networked machines
to the Internet (“Internet of Things”) requires ahuge number of additional IP addresses.
Leading content providers in the Internet worldsuch as Facebook and Google are already running on the new IPv6 version. Some governments have already followed their success story. Not supporting IPv6 may cause connection
problems and information shortage on a website to users connected from an IPv6-enabled
network. When implementing IPv6, one has toremember to “think globally and act locally”.
No citizen is to be deprived of the convenienceof an ever improving information society.
If public and private sectors introduce IPv6 intheir policies, there will be no more exclusionfrom the future information society.
This best practice paper describes some aspects of IPv6 transition based on experiencesfrom the national pilots of the GEN6 project:
http://www.gen6-project.eu/

3. Roll out for citizens
is on its way
Providers have been using IPv4 addresses forcustomer connections up to now. Most providers which have been in this business for many
years have significant IPv4 resources available.
On the other hand, competitors joining themarket in the last years could not claim a hugeamount of IPv4 addresses. Due to the shortageof IPv4 addresses, they were forced to think
about the step towards IPv6 in their access networks. Nowadays, several providers connect
new customer only with IPv6 and connections
to the ‘legacy’ world of IPv4 are implemented
by tunnelling and network address translation
in IPv4 or 6to4 solutions. In both cases, expensive carrier grade gateways must be implemented. This results in increasing costs for theproviders and consequently for the end users,
citizens or businesses.
With IPv6-enabled server/service and accessconnections, one can use IPv6 without any
gateway. Use of those expensive gateways canbe minimised and therefore, some costly investments can be avoided.
Gen6 project: Authors:
Zuzana Duračinská (CZ.NIC, Czech Republic,
Uwe Holzmann-Kaiser (FhG Fokus, Germany),
Martin Krengel (Citkomm, Germany),Jiří Průša (CZ.NIC, Czech Republic)
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4. IPv6 as a mandatory part ofthe operating system

7. Stagnation on eGovernment
evolution

IPv6 is not only promoted in the Internet but vendors
regard IPv6 as central infrastructure requirement.
Some vendors have declared IPv6 as a mandatory partof their operating system. Since then, there is no system test of Microsoft operating systems without IPv6
enabled. This means that pure IPv4 implementations,which are still the standard in most public administration’s networks are unsupported use cases from thisvendor’s point of view. In practice this means several
networks have been enabled with IPv6 “silently”, to get
vendor support or to use a specific feature. Often there
is no real management for IPv6 as the management is
not aware of the enabled protocol. From the safety andsecurity point this is a high risk for the network.

The continuous growth of electronic communication
demands more connectivity and more hosts. Eachnode requires its own IP address. As described above,
IPv4 addresses have become very limited nowadays.
New large address blocks are no longer available
from the regional registration authorities. Addresses
can often only be acquired from someone that still
has an existing claim on IPv4 addresses (but does notuse all of them). This approach causes delays for new
projects and businesses causing total stoppage due
to unavailability of IPv4 resources.

5. Consumer market equipment
The number of devices per user is growing rapidly today. While a few years ago one computer per person
was the norm, today with smartphones and tablets,
the needs are changing. In practice, these devices are
not specialised equipment for business use. Instead,the evolution is driven by personal requirements
and the consumer market. The professional users inbusiness and government need to install additional
software in order to control these devices. On the
network side, all these devices are IPv6 enabled, andthey cannot be disabled. Consequently, there is still
network equipment using IPv4 even in the local networks. In order to prevent malfunction due to usageof both protocols, proper management is in order.

6. Loss of communication
To give availability of 6to4 gateways to all customers,
most of the time the number of parallel connections
per customer is limited. When websites with a high information density, e.g. city map services, use many several parallel connections to speed up the transmission,some transmissions may get blocked – with an incomplete site presentation as a result on the customer side.
Websites and Internet services providing IPv6 connectivity will not be impacted by those connectivity
issues, because they communicate directly with IPv6
without such gateway limitations.

8. Shadow market on IPv4
addresses
Up to now, IPv4 addresses have not been traded ona market – but the situation is now changing with theupcoming shortage. The implementation of further
services may require the costly acquisition of IPv4 addresses, as they have become a limited asset. Each additional large project requiring additional IPv4 addresses may cause an extra growth in IPv4 address costs.
IPv6 addresses, on the other hand are available in great
number via the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs). Introducing IPv6 and moving traffic to IPv6 can result inoverall lowered acquisition costs for IP addresses.

9. (Re) Enabling the end to end
communication
Today’s local networks mostly operate with so-called“private IP addresses”. Their use was not originallyplanned when the Internet was designed. In the
public Internet only packets with public IP addresses
will be routed, therefore an address translation
between the address types must be established.
This so called network address translation (NAT) is
located at the Internet gateway of one’s local network.
Due to cooperation between governments, privateorganisations and companies sometimes multiple
networks must be interconnected. Usually, at each
network’s edge a NAT gateway is in use. This inhibits
the end to end view of the IP communication. At
every point of the transmission even the network
administrators only have a clear track up to the next

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NAT gateway. Everything behind is hidden and hard
to reach. In effect, this results in huge administration
efforts in implementation and in troubleshooting of
all those connection paths.
Furthermore, real-time communication profiles suchas voice or video do not operate across NATs without
special network appliances, causing additional costs
in implementation and operation.
In IPv6, the former end to end paradigm of the Internet communication has been re-introduced. The NAT
mechanism with private IP addresses is not available
anymore in IPv6. Therefore, every communication isclearer and more direct which reduces administrative
efforts and operational risks by increased transparency in the transport services.

10. Why removing NAT is not
an issueIn marketing material for the gateway, vendors’ Network Address Translation (NAT) evolved into a security feature. However, the security effects of NAT are
a result of stateful ingress packet filtering and application layer gateways, features which are also available
without address translation. The advertised hiding of
local endpoint addresses behind a NAT firewall is amyth for many use cases, as for example the local IP
address of a client can be read in every http-basedbrowser session on the server side.
In IPv6, the strength of the public-to-private network
border is in the strength of the gateway configuration
with suitably customised, well deliberated rule sets,just like with IPv4 today. However, due to NAT andthe absence of the address confusion, rules can be
defined more clearly and therefore, with less risk of
misconfiguration.

11. Policy backgroundThe support of the new Internet Protocol version 6
has been implemented by some governments into
their national policies. However, in the era of the global Internet, using IPv6 is not only a national, but rather
a European issue. Policy support for IPv6 has been
first mentioned in 2002 within the communication
called “next Generation Internet – Priorities for action
in migrating to the new Internet protocol IPv6”. However, today’s digital agenda for Europe is much more
important for current decision makers and policy
creators. These key European strategies encouraged,
within the action 89, the member states to make eGovernment services fully interoperable while overcoming organisational, technical or semantic barriers andsupporting IPv6. The need for providing electronic
services via IPv4 plus IPv6 is also highlighted within
the European eGovernment action Plan 2011-2015.

12. Recommendation forpolicy-makers
Based on analysis and long-term experiences from theGEN6 project, the following recommendations can bemade in order to improve the provisioning of electronic services as well as the implementation of IPv6:• Involve support for improvement of electronic services and IPv6 in strategic documents and policies.
• Require IPv6 support when renewing infrastructures and electronic services, preferably in the RFP(Request for Proposal) documentation.
• Communicate on a regular schedule with national
domain registries since they are usually the ones
who inform about various ways of IPv6 implementation.
• Follow awareness-raising and information eventsin order to learn about possible ways for upgrading software and hardware that need to be transformed to IPv6.
• Maintain permanent discussions among the experts, politicians and civil servants to exert pressure
on the implementation of IPv6 and related current
standards.
• Provide practical workshops for experts for learning and working with IPv6 and spread technical aswell as organisational best common practices.

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13. How to get informed?
Transition efforts exist in the public sector as wellas in the private sector. In order to fulfil the European competitiveness and Innovation Framework
Programme, we have to do our best to extend theEuropean knowledge society. Transitioning to IPv6
requires learning and being familiar with best prac-

tices. Be active! Get involved! Learn and make sure
you are keeping track. Information and ongoing
discussions will prevent underestimation of this important issue and will help avoid possible mistakes
in the future. The private and non-for-profit sector
needs to be involved, too.

Figure 16: Private Sector-Public Sector

14. Best practices in government policy
In the Czech Republic, legislation made implementationof IPv6 mandatory for central government institutions.
This government resolution, prepared by the Ministryof Industry and Trade in 2009 and extended in 2013,
had a positive impact on IPv6 that resulted in considerable higher rank of IPv6 deployment. During the last
one and half years, the IPv6 support on web-servers
has increased from 36% to 57% by Ministries and from
50% to 82% by other central government institutions.
Meanwhile national IPv6 average in the Czech Republic is 19.5% (January 2013) and by TOP 100 companies
only 5%! The example shows that mandatory deployment of IPv6 can be an efficient tool to increase thereadiness for IPv6 and that the public sector can give apositive example to private sector.

Especially in relation to the net neutrality there are interesting examples of policy implementation “Generalrules and recommendations for the use of data traffic
management in the provision of Internet access service” which have been adopted by the Czech Telecommunication Office (CTU). According to these guidelines,“the access to the Internet” means a service enabling toconnect all end user points connected via IPv4 or IPv6.
This definition is related to the net neutrality and CTU
clearly stated that net neutrality means also a freedom
to choose an Internet protocol – IPv4 or IPv6 and thesame rights are granted to IPv4 and IPv6 users.

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15. Best practices in government address allocation
The routing between governmental networks overrented lines and the improvement of security by transparent routing can be significantly supported by using
a homogenous IPv6 addressing space for the national
government. For a central management of domestically used governmental IP addresses, each country
needs a Local Internet Registry (LIR), registered with
the RIPE NCC (see Figure 17). This is what has been
done in Germany, and it is currently under discussionin Spain. Germany set up its central LIR called “de.government “in 2009. Upon extensive requests, the RIPE
NCC allocated /26 prefix for this LIR.

Beneath the LIR de.government a set of Sub-LIRs werecreated to organise the IPv6 address deployment inGermany. Based on the /26 prefix, the LIR takes careof the (top level) management of the IPv6 addresses
for the public administrations in Germany. A domestic
address plan determines the use of the next six bits,
after the /26 prefix. This way, one or more /32 prefixes are allocated to sub-LIRs as the basis for /48 site
prefixes they hand out on request to their customers.

Figure 17: LIR de.goverment

16. Best practices in energy and green IT
The Greek pilot in GEN6 aims to influence the behaviour of the local school communities by raising theirenergy awareness. The pilot provides real-time energy
efficiency services over IPv6 enabled grids to the local
educational community, providing students with information on their energy consumption patterns andraising awareness among them on the energy savings
that behavioural changes may bring. Through the im-

plementation of the Greek IPv6 pilot, the deployed infrastructure has been extended and many problems
that are related with the use of IPv4 for access to thesmart energy meters have been solved. This extension provides a signal to European stakeholders that
IPv6 technology can be an enabler for green IT.
Further reading at: http://www.gen6-project.eu/publications/booklets/

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17. Best practices in emergency response systems
The aim of the advanced emergency response communications pilot or A-ERCS is to clearly
demonstrate the state-of-the-art
IPv6-enabled features in emergency response environments.

Figure 18: A-ERCS

More specifically, the A-ERCS pilot demonstrates:• A scalable and robust overlay system for data transport and rich multimedia service built across bothprofessional (e.g. DMR, TERA and satellite), commercial networks (e.g. UMTS/ HSPA, LTE) and ruggedized alternative commercial-of-the-shelf (cots)systems (mesh Wi-Fi and ad-hoc WiMAX).
• The ability of such a system to deliver seamless connectivity from targeted/affected areas across heterogeneous technologies and public networks, locallyas well as on national and cross-border levels.
• Capabilities of the IPv6 technology to assist in deployment of automatic network planning and deployment capabilities, vital to all PPDR systems.

• IPv6 support for advanced features, such as network, node and host auto configuration, and selforganisation and self-healing characteristics.
• The ability of such a system to assure secure and
QoS-enabled transmission of data, voice and multimedia-rich services system by relying upon modern
professional and commercial telecommunications
networks and IPv6-based technologies and features.
The A-ERCS pilot is part of 6inACTION, a broader
PPDR communications and intervention management solution. Further information is available at:www.6inaction.net or refer to: http://www.gen6-project.eu/publications/booklets/.

18. Best practices in backbone transition
The Spanish IPv6 transition pilot within the GEN6 project is implemented by the Ministry of Finance andPublic Administration (MINHAP) and the Ministry ofIndustry, Energy and Trade (MINETUR), with the collaboration of the University of Murcia. It aims to foster
the IPv6-readiness of eGovernment services, with apragmatic approach based on the following principles:• Building upon the infrastructure already in place,making the most of the IPv6 capabilities of the existing hardware, software and networks;• Relying on the use of shared services, increasing
efficiency in the use of the existing resources, andavoiding divergence in technologies and solutions;• Providing enough flexibility for accommodating thevarious transition paths of the different administrative units (IPv4 and IPv6 coexistence);• Ensuring experience from the early adopters of IPv6of what is shared and used by all administrations
softening transition.
The pilot takes advantage of the existence of Red
SARA (SARA network), operated by MINHAP, whichconnects all Spanish Public Administrations, as well as
the shared services that Red SARA provides. Further
reading:
http://www.gen6-project.eu/publications/booklets/.

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19. Best practices in datacentre transition
The German pilot aims to transition the Citkomm datacentre infrastructure in the municipality of Iserlohn,transitioning several applications to an IPv6-enableddual-stack scheme. The local IPv6 infrastructure will
be implemented in the “de.government” IPv6 address
space and will be connected to the DOI network ofGerman administrations.

Besides the specific applications themselves, this requires the network and the local infrastructure including all clients to be IPv6 enabled as well. The work on theapplication backbone differentiates between the inner
backbone, providing specific application services to theemployees of the local government, and the outer backbone – commonly known as de-militarised zone (DMZ in
Figure 19) – offering e-government services, portal applications and web presentations to the citizens.

Figure 19: DMZ

The transition of a datacentre encompasses the following areas:• Network Infrastructure• Application Backbone Infrastructure• Customer environment• Migrating from TLS/SSL to IPsec
Further reading at: http://www.gen6project.eu/publications/booklets/.

20. Best practices in eGovernment service transition
The eGovernment Gateway (EGG) is an existing service and offers a central access to around 200 eGovernment services to more than 13 million registeredusers in Turkey. Around 50,000 new citizens subscribe
to EGG every day. These numbers point out the public interest on this service and reveal possible wide
impact of enabling IPv6 on such a service. The experience to be gained by the realisation of such a bigscale pilot project in the scope of the GEN6 project
allows best practices, guidelines, methodologies andtoolkits for the transition of e-Government services allaround Europe. The main goal throughout the pilot
was to make the EGG portal and candidate EGG services IPv6-enabled.

Further reading: http://www.gen6-project.eu/publications/booklets/.
All these pilots are showing why the transition
to IPv6 is unavoidable. They can provide inspiration regarding where to start the transition, whatmight happen during this phase and provide information about what needs to be done and what to
avoid.

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EU-China FIREETSI IPv6 Integration – Industry Specification Group5 • ETSI IPv6 Integration –Industry Specification GroupETSI IPv6 Industry Specification Group (IP6 ISG), Sophia Antipolis, 27 April 2015
IP6 Industry Specification Group to help stakeholders adopt IPv6 and anticipate IPv4
address exhaustion.
ETSI’s newly established IP6 Industry Specification Group (ISG), created to focus on
better IPv6 integration and deployment and held its kickoff meeting on 22nd – 23rd
April at ETSI, Sophia Antipolis, France.
IPv6 was developed to address IPv4 address exhaustion and enable new Internet
services with improved end to end security.
ETSI’s new specification group will focus on
scenarios, use cases and best practices tofoster IPv6 integration and deployment ina variety of targeted communities. The firsttargets will be governments, enterprises,
emergency and public safety organisations,Internet service providers and mobile operators, academia and education. Use of IPv6 in
new technologies will also be addressed, inparticular Internet of Things and Machine to
Machine communications, Software Defined
Networking and Network Functions Virtualisation, cloud computing and smart grids, toname a few. But overall, IP6 ISG will focus on
integrating the IPv6 protocol into the next
generation of mobile telecommunications,
5G systems, looking at the complete wireless network and the full spectrum of mobile
wireless technologies.
At this first ISG meeting, Mr. Latif Ladid waselected as Chairman of the group. He is currently the president of the IPv6 Forum and a
Research Fellow at the University of Luxembourg. Mrs. Yanick Pouffary and Mr. Patrick
Wetterwald, respectively from Hewlett-Packard and Cisco Systems, were elected as ViceChairpersons.
“IP6 ISG was created to help guarantee thegrowth of the Internet and make sure that allparts of the world, including Africa, Latin America and Asia, will be connected, as we are runningout of IPv4 addresses”, says Luis Jorge Romero,ETSI Director General. “Some large mobile operators have already implemented this protocol
and with the arrival of the Internet of Things andthe growing number of connected devices roundthe world, IPv6 becomes a necessity.”
Widespread adoption of IPv6 has been slow
but new Internet services are driving IPv6 deployment and if the current trend continues,
we should achieve 50% penetration by 2017.
IPv6 uses a 128-bit address, allowing 2128 addresses, that is more than 7.9×1028 times as
many as IPv4, this much larger address spaceshould be sufficient for the foreseeable future. IPv6 also offers many other benefits andenhanced features compared to IPv4, such as
simplified processing by routers, Quality ofService, security, IP mobility, etc. But it must
cope with the demand and anticipate the full
expansion of Internet requirements in allparts of the world, without creating a digital
divide, providing everyone and all industries
with the IP addresses they need.
Participation in the IP6 Industry Specification
Group is open to all ETSI members as well asorganisations who are not members, subject
to signing ISG Agreements. For more information on how to participate please contact
ISGsupport@etsi.org.

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Table 7 below outlines the work items under progress:

Source: https://portal.etsi.org/tb.aspx?tbid=827&SubTB=827
Two scenarios have been selected for this Enterprise and 5G paper, mainly the enterprise sector which willbe the toughest field to win as the ROI is the prime driver to mobilise new IT budgets to update the ICT infrastructure. The second scenario chosen is 5G, a Greenfield opportunity to specify IPv6 only from the outset as
it is demonstrated by the deployment of 4G networks that IPv6 adds tremendous features over and beyond
the IPv6 address space. These papers are still work in progress but summarises very well what needs to be addressed in the needed steps to investigate when deploying IPv6 in these networks.

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IPv6 Deployment in the Enterprise6 • IPv6 Deployment
in the Enterprise43

1. Introduction
There are many scenarios/variations to enable IPv6 within the enterprise world; however,there is no “one size fits all” answer. This document does not attempt to provide guidance
for all possible networking situations. Enterprise network architects must each take theresponsibility of choosing the best solution
for their own case.
Let’s review history; when IPv4 emerged as
the standard Internet protocol in the 1980s,
the address space—some four billion IP addresses—seemed more than adequate. Today it is clearly no longer the case because
the world has moved from IP enabled to IP
dependent. In fact, we have run out. With thegrowing number of users and the proliferation of smart devices and things, IPv4 address
space exhaustion is a major Information andCommunications Technology (ICT) issue. The
current IPv4-based Internet can no longer
sustain the explosive growth of ICT. Any organisation that relies on the Internet to any
extent must be prepared to support IPv6. The
move to IPv6 is inevitable, as the Internet isthe cornerstone of our connected society.
Furthermore, IPv6 offers important businessand technical advantages. Among them: higher performance, enhanced mobility, automated management, built-in multicasting for
multimedia applications, enhanced security,
simplified administration and many more.
Enterprises may be tempted to put off transitioning to IPv6 until some later date because
all existing IPv4-based infrastructures willcontinue to work after the last IPv4 address
is issued. Postponing the inevitable, however,can put an enterprise at a competitive disadvantage. As more and more customers operate in an IPv6 world, companies supporting
only IPv4 risk being shut out of high-growthmarkets because they are unable to reach—or be reached by—these customers. The fallacy in this position is that maintaining IPv4only communications can put enterprises at
a competitive disadvantage. Seamless, pervasive connectivity is an integral part of doing
business today.

2. Core principles
There are three core principles to shape IPv6 network development:• The first principle is to maintain a standardsbased approach and avoid proprietary technologies. Embracing open standards allows
the use of best-of-breed products for whatever needs arise. A network build on open
standards will have interoperability with thebroadest base of users and partners.
• The second principle is planning. Without proper planning, the transition will be
plagued with rework and missteps.

• The third principle is repeatability of the network design across the network (a standard
set of requirements, and a standard solution design to meet the enterprise network
requirements).
Such standardisation increases efficiency inbuilding out the network, and also makes it
easier to troubleshoot the network in eachlocation.
43

Author Yanick Pouffary, Vice-Chair, ETSI IP6 ISG

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3. IPv6 Transition strategies in Enterprise Networks
The vast majority of devices, laptops, desktops, operating systems, switches, routers, content providers,
carriers, and Internet service providers (ISPs) support
native IPv6 today at no extra cost, which makes it possible to deploy a network based on IPv6. However,enterprises typically purchased and configured their
network to support IPv4 traffic only. And while mostequipment can be software enabled, some may need
to be replaced to add support for IPv6. Furthermore,even if the capabilities to operate in a dual network
configuration exist, additional planning steps, andarchitecture design will most likely be required. Similarly management systems and security systems thatcan support both environments are necessary. Enterprises must also verify that applications they use canoperate correctly and are IPv6-enabled.

Because IPv4 and IPv6 will coexist for some time, aphased deployment is recommended to minimise
the impact of the transition and keep costs manageable. Recognising that IPv4 and IPv6 will run parallel
to each other for the foreseeable future, IETF established three standard transition mechanisms: each ofthese techniques has advantages and trade-offs. The
optimal solution will depend on a variety of factors,
including the enterprise’s current environment andlong-term goals. It may also encompass all three transition mechanisms. It is important to understand that
one method does not fit all.

Figure 20: Transition Options

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In planning the IPv6 initiative, the following three key
families of mechanisms enable the transition:

The main IPv6 transition deployment models that are
being discussed are listed below:• Dual-stack - Provides support for both protocols on
the same device to allow for communications withboth IPv4-only and IPv6-only nodes. This mechanism is the most versatile. A dual stack transition
strategy enables a very smooth transition and will
likely remain a part of the worldwide Internet infrastructure for years to come, until IPv4 is fully retired.

• IPv4 only: Delays the introduction of IPv6 to a later
date and remain an all-IPv4 network. Over the longterm, it is expected that this migration strategy willlead to problems and increased costs. Due to theincrease in traffic there will be an increased demandfor IP addresses and the usage of NAT in the carriers’ network, denoted as Carrier Grade Network Address Translation (CG-NAT). In particular, all traffic
to and from the Internet will have to pass CG-NAT.
Furthermore, growth in bandwidth demand can
only be handled with increased CG-NAT capacity,which has a higher cost and single point of failure.

• Tunnelling - Encapsulates IPv6 packets in IPv4 headers (or vice-and-versa). Tunnelling enables the network team to create islands of IPv6 or IPv4 capabilities, and in the short term, to connect them over the
existing IPv4 network. Tunnelling enables networks
in transition to take advantage of IPv6 services whileremaining connected to the IPv4 world.
• Translation - Between IPv4 and IPv6, enterprises
should also implement a procurement policy toready the network backbone so that IPv6 can beturned on without having to do a fork and replace
physical hardware.

• Coexistence of IPv4 and IPv6: Requires the use of
a dual-stack, introducing IPv6 in the network next
to IPv4. Please note, however, that dual-stack networks are more complex to deploy, operate, andmanage. Furthermore, this option also requires anaddress management solution for both IPv4 andIPv6 addresses.
• IPv6 only: Introduces IPv6 in the network and removes IPv4 completely. This approach can provide
benefits because IPv6-only networks are simpler todeploy, operate, and manage. Moreover, an address
management solution is required only for IPv6 addresses. However, the problem with this approachis that many devices, websites, and applications still
only work on IPv4; therefore, moving to an IPv6-only
network may lead to differences in network quality.
That is why NAT64 should be offered in addition tooffering IPv6 only.

4. Preparation and Assessment Phase• Planning• Assessment – Network and application readiness• Acceptance criteria• Security Policy• Tools Assessment• Applications Assessment

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5. Architecture

7. Lessons Learned: IPv6
touches everything

Address Plan
One of the first choices a network designer needs
to make is the type of addresses to be used in the
network core. Should the network use provider-independent global addresses, «private» addresses (either RFC 1918 addresses or unique-local addresses)
or something else? A related choice is whether to use
only link-local addresses on certain links.
• [REF IETF ID draft-ietf-v6ops-design-choices-08] PI- Globally-unique IPv4 or IPv6 addresses obtained
directly from an address registry. An organisation
which has such addresses is considered to have «itsown» address space.
• PA - Globally-unique IPv4 or IPv6 addresses obtained from an upstream provider. Such addresses
must be returned if the relationship with the upstream provider ceases.
• Private - Either RFC 1918 IPv4 addresses or uniquelocal IPv6 addresses [RFC4193].

Routing• Choice of IGP & BGP.
• Choice separation of IPv4 and IPv6?
• To what degree should IPv4 and IPv6 traffic be
kept separate?
• To what degree should IPv4 and IPv6 routing information be kept separate?
• External connectivity choices.

Security
Security must be applied to both IPv4 and IPv6. IPv6 is
not so different than IPv4 since it is a connectionless
network protocol using the same lower-layer service
and delivering the same service to the upper layer.
Therefore, the security issues and mitigation techniques are mostly identical with the same exceptions
that are described further.

What has industry learned along the way? First andforemost, that introducing IPv6 is a long journey. Dual-stack network infrastructure will likely endure formany years, for as long as IPv4-only devices remain inplace. In the meantime, organisations that rely on theInternet must undertake a transition now. Remember
by the time the network is asked for IPv6 for competitive purposes, it will be too late.
Another key lesson is that IPv6 is not just a network
challenge. Moving to IPv6 is more than a network
protocol upgrade since everything in IT is connectedto the network, and the network in turn touches everything in the IT environment. It requires an acrossthe-board, holistic-IT approach. It touches everythingfrom server and desktop operating systems to officeproductivity suites, ERP platforms, email, web services, and management software and security tools. IPv6
impacts the entire IT ecosystem.
One key aspect that is often underestimated by someIT professionals is the challenge of application IPv6
enablement. While providers of off-the-shelf software
have been dealing with this challenge by writing applications to be IP version independent, home-grown
applications are behind and will also need to be updated to accommodate IPv6. Application teams aregoing to have to add IPv6 support to their applications
and test IPv6 in their applications. Enablement of IPv6
applications takes place one application at a time.
Plan ahead with partners, users - and achieving IPv6
deployment is not entirely within any single organisation’s hands. Beyond internal infrastructure and applications, every organisation must plan with partners
and end-users. When you transition to IPv6, you haveto inventory all your content. You have to have conversations with your partners and suppliers to makesure they’re ready to move forward, too.

6. Campus and Datacentre• Datacentre Virtualisation• Campus Networks

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8. Future Impact

9. Reference Guides

The prospect of transitioning to IPv6 may be daunting, but everyone who relies on the Internet faces thechallenge. The worst mistake is assuming the IPv6transition can wait. Anyone who relies exclusively on
IPv4 will eventually be put at a competitive disadvantage. The legacy IPv4 based Internet can no longer
grow. Without deployment and support of IPv6, it isjust a matter of time before networks/businesses become isolated and unable to communicate. The transition to date has been gradual but the steep curve isstarting and it is critical to be prepared. For the past
30 years, the IT industry has embedded IPv4 related
knowledge in all its processes, in all its infrastructure
gear like network management tools, load balancers,
firewalls and unfortunately, in all applications. So it
will take time.

The following documents from the IETF provide guidance on strategies for adding IPv6 to a network:

There is not a single recipe for IPv6 transformation.
Each enterprise is unique and depends on its uniquebusiness goals, long-term vision, and constraints. It is
critical to put in place a joint Business & IT Task Force.
This will help to ensure a smooth path toward IPv6.
A pragmatic roadmap for an IPv6 transition, while
also developing clear business benefits that can beachieved through the transition.

• Guidelines for Using IPv6 Transition Mechanisms
during IPv6 Deployment (2011) - RFC6180 for general advice.
• Enterprise IPv6 Deployment Guidelines (2014) RFC7381 and IPv6 Enterprise Network Analysis - IP
Layer 3 Focus (2007) - RFC4852.
• IPv6 Unicast Address Assignment Considerations- RFC5375 for creating an IPv6 addressing plan aswell as Some Design Choices for IPv6 Networks –IETF ID draft-ietf-v6ops-design-choices-08.
• Mobile Networks Considerations for IPv6 Deployment (2011) - RFC6342 for mobile network providers.
• Wireline Incremental IPv6 (2012) - RFC6782 for wireline service providers.

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7 • IPv6-based 5G Mobile
Wireless Internet
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1. Introduction
The fifth generation of mobile technology(5G) will address the demands and business
contexts of 2020 and beyond. Moreover, it isexpected that (1) the future European society
and economy will strongly rely on 5G infrastructure, (2) its impact will go far beyond existing wireless access networks with the aim
for communication services, reachable everywhere, all the time, and faster and (3) 5G technology will be adopted and deployed globallyin alignment with developed and emerging
markets’ needs.
According to [5GPPP], several key drivers anddisruptive capabilities will help the adoption
and deployment of 5G globally. In particular,
regarding the key drivers, 5G will ensure user
experience continuity in challenging situations such as high mobility (e.g. in trains), andvery dense or sparsely populated areas, andjourneys covered by heterogeneous technologies. At the same time 5G will be the key
enabler for the Internet of Things (IoT) by providing a platform to connect a massive number of sensors, rendering devices, and actuators with stringent energy and transmission
constraints, as seen in Figure 21. In addition,
new mission critical services will be deployed,
requiring very high reliability, global coverage
and/or very low latency, which are up to now
handled by specific networks, typically public
safety, will become natively supported by the
5G infrastructure.
Moreover, it is expected that 5G will integrate
networking, computing and storage resourc-

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es into one programmable and unified infrastructure, which will allow for an optimised
and more dynamic usage of all distributed
resources and the convergence of fixed, mobile and broadcast services. This unification
will also enable 5G to support multi tenancy
models, enabling operators and other players to collaborate in new ways.
5G will leverage on the cloud computing concepts and will stimulate paving the way forvirtual pan European operators relying on
nationwide infrastructures.
Another important key driver is that 5G is being designed to be a sustainable and scalable
technology. This can be realised by firstly, thetelecom industry which will stimulate andwork towards a drastic energy consumption
reduction and energy harvesting. Moreover,sustainable business models for all ICT stakeholders will be enabled by cost reductions
through human task automation and hardware optimisation.
One of the most important key drivers is that
5G will create an ecosystem for technical andbusiness innovation. This will be enabled by
the fact that network services will rely more
and more on software, while the creation andgrowth of start-ups in the sector will be encouraged. Furthermore, the 5G infrastructures will
provide network solutions and involve verticalmarkets such as automotive, energy, food andagriculture, city management, government,
healthcare, smart manufacturing, public transportation and water management.

Author and Rapporteur: Georgios Karagiannis, ETSI IP6 ISG

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Figure 21: 5G Key drivers and disruptive capabilities, copied from (5GPPT)

Moreover, with the rapid development of the 5G network infrastructure, as well as other technology enablers such as IoT, mobile Internet, cloud computing,
SDN, virtualisation, smart home and Internet of vehicles, there is a consensus between different stakeholders that the Internet demand is no longer limited
to exhausting IP addresses, but extends to the endto-end interconnection and permanently stable IP ad-dresses as seen in Figure 22 and 23. Moreover, it has
a higher requirement for the security, management,
maintenance as well as the operation of the next generation Internet. One of the main challenges associated with the above statement is associated with how
gradually to stop IPv4, deploy IPv6 in full scale andstart using the Internet of the 21st century.

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2. IPv6 Transition strategies in Mobile Networks
Currently several IPv6 migration strategies can be
identified. The main IPv6 migration strategies thatare being discussed by Mobile Network Operators(MNOs), see e.g. [ALU-IPv6] are listed below:• IPv4 only: Delays the introduction of IPv6 to a later
date and remain an all-IPv4 network. Over the longterm, it is expected that this migration strategy willlead to problems and increased costs for the MNO.
Due to the increase in traffic, refer to Section 8.4 5G
requirements, there will be an increased demandfor IP addresses and on using NAT in the carriers
network, denoted as Carrier Grade Network Address Translation (CG-NAT). In particular, all traffic
to and from the Internet will have to pass CG-NAT.
Furthermore, growth in bandwidth demand can only
be handled with increased CG-NAT capacity, which
has a higher cost. This will mean that the MNO isunable to benefit from the increasing ratio of IPv6to-IPv4 Internet traffic. This mechanism works only
for DNS-based applications; IPv4-only.
• Coexistence of IPv4 and IPv6: Requires the use of
a dual-stack, introducing IPv6 in the network next
to IPv4. For a MNO, this approach is a less desirable
option because dual-stack networks are more complex to deploy, operate, and manage. Furthermore,this option also requires an address management
solution for both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.
• IPv6 only: Introduces IPv6 in the network and removes IPv4 completely. This approach can provide
benefits for a MNO, because IPv6-only networks are
simpler to deploy, operate, and manage. Moreo-ver, an address management solution is required
only for IPv6 addresses. This results on the fact that
there is no impact on scale, charging, and roaming
because only a single bearer with a single stack isrequired. However, the problem with this approachis that many UE (User Equipment) devices, websites,
and applications still only work on IPv4 and moving
to an IPv6-only network may lead to inferior service
for MNO customers, resulting in customer dissatisfaction.
• Enhanced IPv6 only + NAT64: In addition to offering IPv6 only, IPv4 is offered as a service over IPv6
for DNS-based applications. For the MNO, benefits
from the IPv6 only strategy that there is no impact
on scale, charging, and roaming as only a single
bearer with a single stack is required. DNS64 (Domain Name System 64) also embeds IPv4 Internet
destinations in IPv6 addresses. However, non-DNS
applications are not supported and will be broken,
which could result in a lower quality service for theoperator’s customers.
• Enhanced IPv6 only + 464XLAT: This strategy of IPv6
only + NAT64 solution solves at the same time, thedrawback associated with the support of non-DNS
applications. In particular, for IPv4-only, non-DNS
applications, IPv4 packets are translated to IPv6
packets by the UE and subsequently are translatedback to IPv4 packets by a central CG-NAT64, which is
deployed behind the PGW (PDN Gateway).
More details will be provided in a subsequent versionof this document.

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3. 5G Architectures
This section briefly presents the 5G architecture proposed by [NGMN] and [5GPPP]. Further details will be provided in a subsequent version of their documents.

Figure 22: 5G Architecture, copied from (NGMN)

Figure 23: 5G Architecture, copied from (5GPPP)

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4. 5G Key Requirements
This section is based on the 5G requirements proposed in [NGMN]. Further details will be provided in a subsequent version of that document.
The 5G requirements derived by [NGMN] are:• User Experience• New Business Models• Consistent User Experience• User Experienced Data Rate
• Latency• Mobility• User Experience KPIs
• System Performance• Connection Density• Traffic Density• Spectrum Efficiency• Coverage• Resource and Signalling Efficiency• System Performance KPIs
• Device Requirements• Operator Control Capabilities on Devices• Multi-Band-Multi-Mode Support in Devices• Device Power Efficiency• Resource and Signalling Efficiency• Enhanced Services• Connectivity Transparency• Location• Security• Resilience and High Availability• Reliability• Connectivity Providers• Partner Service Provider and XaaS Asset Provider• Network Sharing Model• Network Deployment, Operation and Management• Cost Efficiency• Energy Efficiency• Ease of Innovation and Upgrade• Ease of Deployment• Flexibility and Scalability• Fixed-Mobile Convergence• Operations Awareness• Operation Efficiency• Ultra Low-cost Networks for Very Low-ARPU Areas• Ultra Low-Cost Networks for Very Low-ARPU MTC
Services
An additional requirement is the demand of deploying and using an Internet technology that has (1) anon-exhausting IP address range and (2) is able toprovide end-to-end interconnection and permanently
stable IP address, and (3) which has a higher requirement for the security, management, maintenance aswell as the operation of the next generation Internet.

5. Benefits of applying IPv6 in 5G
Work is ongoing to show how IPv6 will provide benefits to the solutions imposed by these requirements. In
addition, the sooner a cohesive strategy for 5G and IPv6 is developed and applied among those in standardisation and research, the benefits and risks of using IPv6 in 5G will be validated. Overall, this will enable the fast
deployment and success of 5G. In subsequent versions of 5GPPP documents, the conclusions and next steps
associated with the objectives, the technology guidelines, the step-by-step process, the benefits, the risks, thechallenges and the milestones of deploying the IPv6-based 5G Mobile Wireless Internet will be presented.

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ConclusionIn a well-run relay race, the baton-holder is supposed to sprint into the exchange area, only slowing down as the second runner speeds up to grab
the baton. It is a critical time, in which either runnermight fail to make the exchange and drop the baton
or when confusion can translate into lost time. The
IPv6 transition is at perhaps a similar critical juncture.
IPv4 is nearing the end of its leg, IPv6 has not yet completely cranked up to speed, and for a time, they willboth be running side-by-side.
Government policy-makers, regulators, internationalorganisations, standards bodies, stakeholder groups,
companies, ISPs, and operators – all of them may berequired to pass the baton to the new protocol. The
complexity of the process, with its technological, economic, and political dimensions, reflects the real diversity of Internet governance as it has evolved today.
Ultimately, this diversity equals strength, but it may
take some time to accelerate IPv6 adoption to reachthe critical impetus for Internet expansion and technology improvements. As in a relay race, the transition indicates how well the multiple participants – allof the stakeholders involved in IPv6 – can work together. Undoubtedly, the process will provide lessons
and pave the way for future improvements in the fieldof IP addressing and Internet governance in general.
For now, the race is still being run, with the expansionof the global Internet as the ultimate prize.
To understand the complexity of this transition process and how governments and multi-stakeholder
groups can facilitate it, the following aspects must be
considered:• The importance of IP addressing, its distribution
worldwide and its key function in a data- intensive
world of online services, applications and networks
that is putting strain on the availability of addresses;• The status of IPv6 deployment and adoption trends
from IPv4 to IPv6;• The costs entailed in IPv6 adoption;• The main roadblocks/challenges in deploying andtransitioning to IPv6, such as a lack of business incentives or consumer awareness, as well as technical incompatibility and security issues;• The existing policies, regulatory measures andguidelines developed to support the transition from
IPv4 to IPv6;• The best practices and recommendations that canencourage, facilitate and support a swifter adoptionof IPv6;• Potential innovative steps that policy-makers could
take to accelerate or facilitate IPv6 deployment; and• Measures already taken by the ITU, industry, andgovernments to promote awareness of the criticality of IPv6 deployment.
The deployment of IPv6 has not resonated very wellwith the business sectors in much the same way as
IPv4 for the simple reason it was not IPv4 that was
promoted by the Internet while IPv6 is an upgrade
and like any upgrade it needs a real business case beyond the depletion of the IP address space.

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Annexes
Annex 1: Preparing an IPv6 Address Plan
Courtesy Sander Steffann,IPv6 Expert, Trainer and Consultant at Steffann(http://www.steffann.nl/site/)

In an efficient IPv6 address plan, the IPv6 addressing
ranges are grouped effectively and logically.
This has several advantages, including:• Security policies are easier to implement, such as
the configuration of access lists and firewalls.
• Addresses are easier to trace: the address contains
information about the use type or location where
the address is in use.
• An efficient address plan is scalable: it can be expanded, for example, to include new locations or
use types.
• An efficient IPv6 address plan also enables more efficient network management.
IPv4 addresses have run out, and more and morebusinesses and institutions see the necessity to migrate to IPv6. As a result, they need an IPv6 address
plan. An IPv6 address is 128 bits long, which means
that, in theory, there are 2128 addresses available, agreat deal more than the 232 (= 4.3 billion) addresses
available with IPv4. To give you an idea of the volume:2128 or 340 282 366 920 938 463 463 374 607 431 768
211 456 or 340 billion billion billion billion represents
approximately the number of grains of sand on ourplanet. This means that an IPv6 address plan will lookvery different from an IPv4 address plan.
An address plan using the IPv4 system limits the options available to an organisation because there are

relatively few IPv4 addresses still available. This is
why the IPv4 addressing system is based on efficientaddress assignment. If you apply for an IPv6 address
range at many Internet Service Providers, you will beassigned 280 addresses (a/ 48 prefix). This is such ahuge amount that efficiency virtually ceases to be anissue. This is why it is worthwhile adopting an IPv6 address plan: a system in which you assign the IPv6 addresses to locations and/or use types.
In an efficient IPv6 address plan, the IPv6 addressing
ranges are grouped effectively and logically. However,an efficient IPv6 address plan may “waste” large numbers of IPv6 addresses. In almost all cases, this is agood trade-off: seemingly wasteful practices lead tomore efficiency elsewhere, for instance, by avoiding
unnecessary inﬂation of routing tables in routers. The
addresses are there; you may as well use them. Thismanual will show you how to prepare an effective
IPv6 address plan. In making that plan, you will needto make a number of important choices. Please thinkcarefully about these choices to ensure that the address plan will meet the requirements of your organisation. This manual will provide suggestions to help
you to make the right choices.
Download the IPv6 Address Plan Document: http:/
www.ipv6forum.com/dl/presentations/IPv6-addressing-plan-howto.pdf

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Annexes
Annex 2: IPv6 Readiness & Procurement Guidelines
Authors: Merike Käo, Jan Žorž, Sander Steffann
Courtesy of Jan Žorž,Operational Engagement Programme Manager,
Internet Society

Abstract: To ensure the smooth and cost-efficient up-

take of IPv6 across their networks, it is important that governments and large enterprises specify requirements forIPv6 compatibility when seeking tenders for Information andCommunication Technology (ICT) equipment and support.
This document is intended to provide a Best Current Practice (BCP) and does not specify any standards or policy itself.
It can serve as a template that can be used by governments,
large enterprises and all other organisations when seeking
IPv6 support in their tenders or equipment requirements
and offer guidance on what specifications to ask for. It canalso serve as an aid to those people or organisations interested in tendering for government or enterprise contracts.
Be aware that the standards listed here have their origin invarious bodies, which operate independent of the RIPE community, and that any of these standards might be changed
or become replaced with a newer version. You may alsoneed to adjust the recommendations to your specific local needs. Some parts of this section are loosely based on
the NIST/USGv6 profile developed by the US government:
http://www.nist.gov/itl/antd/upload/usgv6-v1.pdf. The authors have modified these documents to make them more
universally applicable. This option includes a list of RFC
specification standards that must be supported, divided
into eight categories of devices. This document also follows
the IPv6 Node requirements document, RFC6434. This RFC
is the general IETF guidance on what parts of IPv6 need to
be implemented by different devices.
General information on how to use this document An IPv6
Ready Logo certificate can be required for any device. Thisis the easiest way for vendors providing the equipment toprove that it fulfils basic IPv6 requirements. The tender initiator shall also provide the list of required mandatory andoptional RFCs in order not to exclude vendors that did not
yet put their equipment under IPv6 Ready Logo testing certifications. This way public tender can’t be accused of preferring any type or vendor of equipment.
1 The USGv6 specifications are currently undergoing an updated revision which is expected to be completed by early
2012. When we specify the list of required RFCs; we must list
all mandatory requirements, except the entries that start
with, “If [functionality] is requested…” These entries aremandatory only if the tender initiator requires certain functionality. Please note that the tender initiator should decide
what functionality is required, not the equipment vendor.
Certain features that are in the ‘optional’ section in thisdocument might be important for your specific case and/ororganisation. In such cases the tender initiator should movethe requirement to the ‘required’ section in their tender request. How to specify requirements
As stated above, the IPv6 Ready Logo program does notcover all equipment that correctly supports IPv6; so declaring such equipment ineligible may not be desirable. This
document recommends that the tender initiator specify
that eligible equipment be either certified under the IPv6
Ready program or be compliant with the appropriate RFCs
listed in the section below. About the IPv6 Ready Logo program: http://www.ipv6ready.org/ Also note that there exists
the BOUNDv6 project whose goal is to create a permanent
multi-vendor network environment connecting approved
laboratories where the community can test IPv6-enabledapplications and devices in meaningful test scenarios. Tender initiators are encouraged to have a look and also use
the results of this project.
Download the RIPE document at https://www.ripe.net/publications/docs/ripe-554

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