28 January 2011
- Transition mechanisms that allow IPv4 and IPv6 systems to interoperate were successfully tested under realistic business conditions as part of a pilot project commissioned by IDA. The six-month pilot, which was conducted by British Telecom Frontline (BT Frontline), was completed in December 2010 and its findings shared during a technical workshop in January 2011.
Moving to IPv6 (and its virtually infinite number of IP addresses) is inevitable given the limited and rapidly diminishing stock of available IPv6 addresses on the Internet today. However, given the inherent incompatibility of both versions and the reality that IPv4 addresses will continue to be used in the foreseeable future, transition mechanisms have been developed to enable both protocols to operate simultaneously.
The objective of the pilot is to understand and validate the feasibility of implementing the various IPv6 transition mechanisms as well as to find out subsequent challenges and benefits that come with each transition. It also aimed to create public awareness on the potential of IPv6 and facilitate its adoption through sharing the results and experiences gained.
The pilot involved physical network setup and configuration, network layer testing, application testing and security testing. BT Frontline successfully implemented the three prime transition mechanisms available today - Tunneling, Dual Stack and Translation - and identified the characteristics and properties that would be useful in making informed decisions in the process of transitioning to IPv6.
Business impact
The pilot highlighted the fact that the IPv6 transition will require the participation of all the industry stakeholders including government, enterprise, service providers, content providers and up to individuals. For example, multinational enterprises and those that deal with government bodies will be impacted by government IPv6 mandates. Also, businesses that host applications accessible via the Internet will need to cater for consumers with both IPv4 and IPv6 public addresses.
In addition, the full ecosystem of ICT infrastructure - including network equipment, modems, consumer devices, operating systems, applications, content servers, and IT systems - will need to be IPv6-ready. Since each protocol needs to work end-to-end, the transition requires network design changes to make the communication path IPv6-capable from the core network all the way to the end users where applications run.
Key recommendations
While the pilot identifies potential challenges and problems that each stakeholders will likely face in their transition to IPv6, a broad-based recommendation most relevant to all parties was issued.
In general, stakeholders need to:
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Baseline existing network inventory and study potential options and techniques to integrate IPv6 into the network within budget constraints;
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Design the transition solution based on stakeholder's current and future business requirements for scalability and ease of maintenance; and
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Develop full implementation details and track migration till completion.
The IPv6 pilot was part of a series of activities under the IDA's IPv6 Transition Programme to address IPv4 exhaustion and facilitate the migration of local ICT landscape to adopt IPv6. As part of the programme, a survey has also been conducted to find out the infrastructure readiness of the stakeholders, the dependency of their businesses on IP addresses and the progress they have made in planning for/implementing IPv6. The findings will be published in the upcoming IPv6 readiness survey and IPv6 adoption guide for Singapore.