Last time about the depletion of IPv4 - about who owns a small share of the remaining addresses and why it happened. Today we are discussing an alternative - the IPv6 protocol and the reasons for its slow spread - someone says that the high cost of migration is to blame, and someone says that the technology is already outdated.
/CC BY SA /
Who implements IPv6
IPv6 has existed since the mid-nineties - it was then that the first RFCs appeared describing the mechanisms of its operation (for example, ). Over the years, the protocol has been refined and tested, until in 2012 it took place and major providers began to use it - among the first were AT&T, Comcast, Internode and XS4ALL.
Later they were joined by other IT companies, such as Facebook. Today, more than half of social network users are from the United States with the sixth version of the protocol. IPv6 traffic is also steadily growing in Asian countries - Vietnam and Taiwan.
IPv6 is being promoted at the international level - at the UN. One of the divisions of the organization last year presented . Its authors proposed a model for migrating to IPv6 and gave recommendations for working with prefixes for government agencies and private companies.
Materials from our blog on Habré:
At the beginning of the year Cisco , in which they said that by 2022 IPv6 traffic will increase four times compared to 2019 (). However, despite the active support of the sixth version of the protocol, such a development of events looks unlikely. IPv6 is spreading around the world rather slowly - today it is supported sites. And there are several reasons for that.
What hinders implementation
First, the technical difficulties. Moving to IPv6 often requires hardware upgrades and configuration. In the case of a large-scale IT infrastructure, this task may not be trivial. For example, the game developer SIE Worldwide Studios tried to switch to the sixth version of the protocol . Engineers revised the network architecture, got rid of NAT and optimized firewall rules. But they did not succeed in completely migrating to IPv6. As a result, the team decided to abandon this idea and curtailed the project.
Second, the high transfer cost. Yes, there are examples in the industry where switching to IPv6 has saved a company money. For example, one of the major Australian ISPs that migrating to IPv6 will cost less than purchasing additional IPv4 addresses. However, even in this case, funds will have to be spent on the purchase of equipment, retraining of personnel and renegotiation of contracts with users.
As a result, migration to a new generation protocol costs a pretty penny for some companies. Therefore, as a leading engineer at one of the British Internet providers, as long as everything works safely on IPv4, the transition to IPv6 will definitely not happen.
/Unsplash/
Experts also note that over the past ten years, the sixth version of the protocol has already become obsolete. Engineers from Rutgers University that IPv6 (like its predecessor) is not well suited for mobile networks. When a user moves from one access point to another, the “old” handover mechanisms are responsible for switching base stations. In the future, when the number of IP addresses and mobile devices in the world increases significantly, this feature may lead to delays when reconnecting.
Among other factors hindering the transition to IPv6, experts highlight slight performance boost new protocol. According to some studies, in the countries of the Asia-Pacific region, packets are transmitted over IPv4 faster than over IPv6 (). In Africa or Latin America, there is no difference at all in data transfer rates.
What are the prospects
Despite all the difficulties, some experts are convinced that IPv6 has a "bright future". According to Vinton Cerf, one of the developers of the TCP / IP protocol stack, the popularity of IPv6 is really growing too slowly, but not everything is lost for the protocol.
John Curran, president of the American Internet registrar ARIN, agrees with this point of view. He that the lack of IPv4 was felt only by large Internet providers. Small companies and ordinary users do not notice problems yet. Therefore, an erroneous impression may be created that the sixth version of the protocol is “dead”. And in the near future (according to Cisco forecasts), IPv6 should accelerate its spread around the planet.
What we write about in the VAS Experts corporate blog:
Source: habr.com