IPv6

IPv6 has been an approved standard for over a decade now. But its adoption has suffered from lack of a compelling reason to deploy it.

ORLANDO -- The future of communications calls for a focus on unified communications and collaboration, workforce mobility, IP telephony and network virtualization. But moving from IPv4 to IPv6? Don't worry about it yet, Gartner analysts say.

Cisco this week enhanced its IPv6 offerings for its carrier core and edge routers in an effort to ease the eventual migration from IPv4.

Predecessor IPv4 is running out of available addresses, Vinton Cerf warns at industry event.

Last week, Comcast was among the first carriers to demonstrate end-to-end IPv6 transmission for residential broadband customers.

Although many businesses say they see no economic advantage to deploying IPv6 over their networks, several panelists at this year's FutureNet said that they soon may not have a choice.

Expecting the supply of IPv4 addresses to dry up soon, the organization that assigns Internet addresses in the U.S. plans to raise the bar for getting them.

The Internet engineering community says its biggest mistake in developing IPv6 - a long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol - is that it lacks backwards compatibility with the existing Internet Protocol, known as IPv4.

You should begin planning your secure migration to IPv6 sooner rather than later, says Scott Hogg, author of IPv6 Security. Remember the tortoise and the hare story. You will regret not spending more time planning when you end up scrambling to implement it in a hurry. And besides, learning about IPv6 is exciting because it's new.

Not long ago, the powers-that-be detected an impending crisis. To resolve it, they rushed into action crafting a proposal that represented an unprecedented upheaval of existing infrastructure. On the grounds that "something needed to be done" to avert the crisis, they brushed aside objections that the upheaval was too convulsive and might nonetheless fail to address the underlying issues that had created the crisis in the first place. The financial bailout proposed by the Treasury Department? No. I'm talking about the creation of IPv6.