Next Internet: IPv4 to IPv6

FEATURES: The Next Internet, By Carolyn Duffy Marsan Government Executive May 1, 2008

“If you believe that you will want your cell phone to be reachable along with your [personal digital assistant], your home network and your car . . . you will need all of the address capacity of IPv6,” says Diana Gowen, senior vice president and general manager of Qwest Government Services in Fairfax, Va. “Every North American business and government needs to make the conversion.”

With IPv6, “everything can be addressable, from a soldier to a sensor to an aircraft to a tank,” he says. “With IPv6, we have unlimited address space. . . . We could have a sensor network of hundreds of thousands of nodes. When you scale that, address space becomes important.”

Defense also needs the end-to-end security that IPv6 offers as well as the ability to prioritize packets of data sent over the Internet and to create ad hoc networks in the field. “In Iraq, when we initially went in, it took weeks or sometimes months to get networks up and running,” Strance says. “With IPv6, it would take hours or at most days to do the same task. We need to be able to move from theater to theater, region to region, and to build seamless networks without network administration issues.”

Next internet includes migration from IPv4 to IPv6. Value added? Unlimited addresses and greater connectivity which leads to increased need to be able to separate signals from noises and an increased demand for smarter software that is self-generating …