Cisco rallies industry for next-gen, v6 Internet

By
EE Times
(07/13/01, 04:41:47 PM EDT)

MANHASSET, N.Y. Marshaling a star-studded partners roster, Cisco Systems Inc. this week rallied support for Internet Protocol version 6, an effort that backers hope will ignite broad acceptance of the next-generation Internet spec.

Though IPv6, as it is called, has languished in experimental limbo as the industry made do with IPv4 patches and Band-Aids, the promise that Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Motorola and Sun will support IPv6 with hardware and software is widely being seen as potentially kick-starting the market.

The patchwork quilt of IPv4 fixes is "why v6 disappeared from the radar screen until now, after being hot around '97 [and] '98," said Lawrence Orans, senior analyst with Gartner Dataquest (Stamford, Conn.). "But now Cisco has made this big splash, based on the impending need for addresses to support mobile devices."

The backing companies, all longtime strategic partners of Cisco, are not uniting in a formal consortium. But all are vowing to promote the spec and to make their servers and operating systems IPv6-ready. Indeed, Microsoft Corp.'s upcoming Windows XP will include an installable IPv6 stack that works side-by-side with the IPv4 stack.

"This will make a big difference as to whether version 6 gets deployed or not," said Basavaraj Patil, senior systems engineer at Nokia and chair of the IP Mobility Working Group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). "When you have players like Microsoft with its 90 percent of the desktop market supporting v6, it provides significant impetus."

Cisco, for its part, said a month ago that it would be offering a free IPv6 upgrade and v6 support for its network components. Separately, Sony Corp. recently announced that it will be IPv6-enabling every device it manufactures in the future.

Still, a broad turn to IPv6 is no slam-dunk, especially since a crucial chunk of it, the Mobile IPv6, has stalled over how to handle security an ironic wrinkle, given that IPv6 is billed as the gateway to universal mobile connectivity.

Moreover, Gartner's Orans doubts whether the Cisco-led initiative will have much impact in the United States. One of IPv6's advantages is a greatly expanded IP address space (128-bit addresses vs. 32-bit), but unlike the Asia-Pacific region, the U.S. market is not running out of addresses yet, he said. Instead, carriers are getting by with IPv4 solutions built on network address translation (NAT) and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol.

"It's well-known that universities like Stanford and Massachusetts Institute of Technology have more IP addresses than all of China," said Orans, who predicted that by 2006, half of all Asia-Pacific carriers will have v6 running in some part of their nets.

Besides the address space, other claimed advantages of IPv6 are integrated autoconfiguration for plug-and-play capability, enhanced mobility features, end-to-end connectivity and security, and a hierarchical structure to facilitate the construction of more complex networks. But so far, a lack of applications that need the enhanced functionality has dampened enthusiasm for IPv6, while enterprise IT managers have shied away from making any changes to networks they have worked so hard to stabilize.

North America's traditional technology leadership with respect to the Internet didn't help IPv6's fortunes either. The 74 percent share of available IP addresses assigned to the United States meant carriers have paid scant attention to the protocol's expanded addressing scheme.

The picture is far different in Europe and Asia, where governments have begun mandating a transition to IPv6. That momentum coupled with the onrush of mobile devices worldwide, each of which will need its own IP address have created enough urgency for Cisco to launch its partnership push.

"Expanded addressing and enhanced mobility, as well as the need to respond to demands from countries such as Korea, China and Japan for our IPv6-enabled technology," are the chief reasons for the timing of the initiative, said Patrick Grossetete, IPv6 product manager for Cisco's IOS Technologies Division (Paris). Its purpose "is to announce to the industry that we have a strong list of partners it's not just Cisco."

Focus on applications

"Cisco has the dominant market share worldwide for routers and switches, and this is a leadership announcement with implications for the Far East," said Orans, the Gartner analyst. "Cisco is attempting to carry forward its industry leadership in IP by laying claim in a broad way to IPv6. What's interesting is the breadth of product, as well as the industry partners they've signed up for this announcement. Most are focused on the applications."

Applications will be key to IPv6's success, observers said. Underscoring the importance of the Sony IPv6 plan, Patil of the IETF observed that "it may well be the case that gaming and peer-to-peer networking applications like Napster will provide the impetus for IPv6 not 3G [third-generation wireless] devices."

Among Cisco's partners, two already have rolled out IPv6-enabled products: Hewlett-Packard Co. and Sun Microsystems Inc. have implemented a dual-stack architecture on their respective Internet servers.

"We enabled v6 in Solaris 8 [Sun's OS] over a year ago," said Bill Moffitt, product line manager for the core Solaris effort, "but to date v6 hasn't had the support it needed" to fuel demand. "The announcement with Cisco shows we're reaching the critical mass where v6 adoption is a good idea and is easy to do having a major router vendor [on board] was essential." Sun will include a v6 stack with every machine going forward, Moffitt said.

At HP, "We could've done something with v6 six months ago," said Mike Wardley, HP-UX server-line marketing manager, "but we chose to wait until there was critical mass. Now it's here."

Besides the dual v6 and v4 stacks, Microsoft plans to provide in XP new Windows Socket 2 application programming interfaces with functions and structures to enable transparent support for IPv6. Its Platform Software Developer Kit includes a guide to facilitate porting Socket 2 applications from v4 to v6.

IBM also plans to enable its operating systems for IPv6, along with its electronics, applications and middleware. While Motorola has said it will make its mobile handsets IPv6-ready, the program is still in the planning stage.

Slow ramp

In the meantime, IPv6 networks are slowly ramping up in the United States, even as Japan, Korea and, more recently, Europe accelerate deployment in response to government mandates. In September 2000, Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori declared that by 2005, Japan would be 100 percent IPv6-deployed in government, education and industry. Last February, the South Korean government followed suit, promising to spend $80 billion by 2005 to roll out IPv6. And in April, the European Commission (EC) declared that quick adoption of IPv6 was essential for the successful launch of 3G mobile phones in Europe. The EC predicted the region would run out of IP addresses by 2005.

None of this surprises Todd Whipple, vice president of Zama Networks (Seattle), which owns one of less than a handful of IPv6 networks in the United States. Zama has live nodes in Seattle and Los Angeles, and soon will add others in San Jose and Tokyo.

With a meager 9 percent of available IPv4 addresses, "Asia is fast running out of addresses," Whipple said. "They can hide behind NATs, but that's [ultimately] unacceptable." NATs are "not a good solution for doing business-to-business transactions," he said.

Even the United States will hit the wall soon, Whipple said, noting that Zama will supply "an IPv6-enabled T1 connection," for testing, to Speakeasy.net, a small Seattle-based ISP looking to shift to an all-IPv6 network.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Defense has joined the v6 bandwagon, calling a meeting this week to study military use of IPv6. The Pentagon foresees soldiers equipped with IP cameras and communications gear. The wide v6 address space will allow the military to link all personnel to the Net and let them communicate without a basestation.