War, famine, pestilence and death.

They fought for the last IPv4 addresses, hoarded and sold them at outrageous prices, traffic and commerce came slowly to a halt… Pestilence invaded the internet …..

Bandits roam the lands. A retired general told recently that the internet looks like the North German plains, easy to invade. Cyberwar and Cybersecurity are becoming mainstream subjects and have increasing Government attention.

In France an ultra-secure lab was set up in Nancy to handle and find antidotes for the most dangerous of these viruses to avoid a Ebola type pandemic. They manipulate these viruses in a network completely isolated from the rest of the internet. As isolated and sterile as a P4 lab for infectious diseases.

Nasty IPv6 strains? Masquerading as someone else was supposed to be more difficult with IPv6 as address abundance would result in much less Network Address Manipulation. But the NAT remains a source of possible pestilence. And will privacy options in IPv6 making it easier still for bad guys to hide?

In the meantime the reality of the paucity of IPv4 addresses sinks in. Five percent of the space left and the IANA granaries will be empty in 300 days or so.

The world notices. The Renesys (5) reports which provide the pulse of the internet to all its serious practitioners noted that over the late july 10 day period 440 new IPv6 prefixes were registered compared to 1449 IPv4 prefixes. 23% of all registrations are now IPv6. This proportion will certainly continue to rise quite rapidly.

The white, red, black and pale stallions will remain in their stables.

This post originally appeared on CircleID.

Tuesday, June 29 at the Cisco Live Conference Las Vegas, John Chambers announced their newest product, the Cius tablet aimed at the enterprise market and positioned as a mobility product. That very same day a two hour IPv6 deployment panel, moderated by Cisco’s Alain Fiocco, featured Google, Microsoft, Comcast and Tata Communications in front of a room filled to near capacity.

The nature of the audience was interesting. Compared to previous years, when asked about their affiliation, the number of hands raised for the category ‘enterprise’ was signicantly higher. ISPs, Government and Education sector used to dominate but Industry now seems to have finally taken notice.

The session was prefaced by John Chambers’ video, the same one presented at the Google IPv6 Conference some weeks ago, announcing Cisco’s commitment to IPv6 support on all product lines. Top down works in most Corporations, so the various fiefs and divisions will certainly take notice as they will most likely be regularly probed on their progress. Let us assume that their bonuses will also be linked to some IPv6 related deliverables, this always brings quite some focus.

What remains of the increasingly putrid IPv4 address pool seems to dry up even faster under the scorching sun of the Vegas Valley. The exhaustion counters agree that a year from now the IANA pool will be dry while some pundits hypothesize a final run on the remaining IPv4 address blocks. Why not a betting site on the exact IPv4 exhaustion date? after all this is Vegas. Allocation of ever smaller blocks remains a temptation, ignoring the fact that associated table sizes would put possibly unbearable strain on routing and affect service quality. ‘Business continuity’ is becoming the new mantra for a more rapid adoption of IPv6. The perceived issues, not surprisingly are the lack of training and back-office readiness as already voiced at the Google Conference.

In the meantime the tier 1 networks are ready, the active IPv6 BGP table is now well over 3000 and shows a healthy growth, content is increasingly IPv6 accessible, operating systems are ready and IPv6 trickles down all the way to the eyeballs, in other words the end-user. Some end-user customers even switched to Comcast, just to be part of their IPv6 trial.

When I will see ‘IPv6 ready’ written on a Cisco Linksys box at Future Shop, I will buy one. I am also eagerly waiting for Videotron, my cable and internet provider, to follow in Comcast’s steps. And by the way, we were told that Cius is Android based and IPv6 ready.

IPv6 is doing well under the desert sun and summer heat.

This post originally appeared on CircleID.

We participated in a two hour panel session on IPv6 Deployment at the Cisco Live Conference in Las Vegas on June 29. Beside Tata Communications, other panel members were from Comcast, Google and Microsoft; the session was moderated by Cisco. We can all be proud of our dual stack IPv4/IPv6 globe spanning AS6453 IP network to which all other panel expand participants happen to connect. Cisco Live is again a major event this year and is attended by more than 9000 participants.

According to their website, Google “believe[s] that IPv6 is essential to the continued health and openness of the Internet – and that by allowing all devices on a network to talk to each other directly, IPv6 will enable innovation and allow the Internet’s continued growth.”

Google is undeniably a powerful player embracing the next-generation Internet Protocol, but will their IPv6 push be a tipping point?
Last year at a conference, Google activated Google maps, enabling IPv6 access and within 24 hours, IPv6 traffic had tripled. Along those lines, more recently, Google decided to IPv6 enable Youtube.com.

By “quietly” turning on its IPv6 support for its YouTube video streaming website, a spike of IPv6 traffic was sent across the Internet. This demonstrates not only the clear need for a globally accessible Internet, but also shows that content providers would suffer from lack of IPv4 address space more so than anyone else.

As one of the most aggressive adapters of IPv6, industry observers are hailing YouTube’s upgrade as a sign of the growing momentum for IPv6. And slowly, but certainly, Google is nudging the world towards adapting IPv6.

For telecom service providers, the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 has been a long time in the making. With IPv4 numbers set to run out by the middle of 2011 according to the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), coupled with the future of the telecom industry revolving around IP, the transition to IPv6 has become increasingly critical to the survival of all service providers. As technologies evolve and the adoption of IP-enabled devices accelerates, IP will enter a new era as the protocol of choice for communications. So what does this mean for service providers?

As the successor to IPv4, IPv6 in short will bring superior reliability and flexibility to the Internet. IPv6 also improves on many of the security shortcomings that exist in IPv4. In particular, IPv6 contains many enhanced security features, such as IPSec.

IPv6 also comes with Quality of Service (QoS) enhancements, allowing premium services for critical Internet traffic, with guaranteed delivery and prioritization.

Additionally, IPv6 will enable businesses to expand their capabilities exponentially without any restrictions or limitations. Using globally unique IPv6 addresses also increases the opportunity for service providers to create new business models, generate additional revenue, and increase the portfolio of services.

Looking ahead, there’s almost no limit to the possibilities of IPv6.

As the first semester of 2010 comes to a close, the IPv4 address pool has dropped to 6%. Another year and we will probably celebrate (mourn?) the end of the IANA IPv4 pool. As Vint Cerf commented on the topic of depletion in an e-mail to Bob Hinden: ‘Sic transit Gloria Mundi’.

The view of an abyss or the fear of judgment day always focuses attention and as a result IPv6 adoption is finally picking up speed. The Google invitational IPv6 Conference in Mountain View clearly illustrated the point. On the transport side Tier-1 ISPs have their networks very much ready for the anticipated traffic surge while a rapidly increasing number of Tier-2 ISPs upgrade their upstream connectivity to dual stack. On the content side, kudos undoubtedly go to Google who progressively made its content accessible in IPv6 including Youtube since February. Needless to say that this created a rather noticeable increase in IPv6 traffic. Some major content providers such as Yahoo and Facebook are also coming along. It can be easily assumed that if the top 10 of the Alexa 500 most popular websites are IPv6 accessible the long tail will follow. The Content Distribution Networks remain relatively timid with the exception of Limelight and Netflix. Here lies an opportunity for the early movers; the growing IPv6 content volumes are theirs to gain. One gaping hole remains the lack of adequate support in some major load balancing products but alternatives are available on the market.

The other front which has been creating a persistent concern is CPE, Customer Premise Equipment. It was refreshing to hear D-Link say that 5 million of their boxes shipped are IPv6-ready. Installed bases of ADSL and Cable modems bases have workaround mechanisms and new ones being installed are IPv6 ready. Outstanding issues often mentioned by everybody in the ecosystem remain lack of training of technical and support staff and the upgrade of back-office systems as well for IT staff to upgrade DNS systems, websites and e-mail systems. A field of opportunities for consulting firms as this becomes more pressing.

While all these activities are underway to forklift the ‘old internet’, the mobile broadband internet continues to grow all around it. The iPhone, iPad and other Androids have ushered the need for true Mobile Broadband. This in turn forces the carriers to accelerate their LTE plans ever more. As of June 7th the GSMA counted 80 operators in 33 countries with firm commitments, up from 64 just two months ago. In the meantime, a further 30 operators are currently in trial mode for LTE making for a total of 110 operators in 44 countries. The ball is undeniably rolling faster and faster.

Last weeks’ Google IPv6 gathering saw presentations by Verizon and T-Mobile which perfectly illustrated the immediate necessity of IPv6 in the mobile world. Verizon will offer its first IPv6 phones in 2011. If one considers that some market researchers project that the sales of smartphones including iPad and iPadlike devices could surpass ‘traditional’ devices, meaning desktops and laptops, within two or three years, we should be in for most interesting times indeed.

It is only fitting that Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, mentioned in his address at the GSM World Congress in Barcelona back in February that support of mobility is a priority in all Google product development.

IPv6 for the masses, masses of IPv6 addresses is within sight.

This post originally appeared on CircleID.

The last remaining stocks disappear from the shelves more quickly than ever before… IPv4 addresses that is.

As the ARIN met in Toronto in April, an inordinate amount of time was spent yet again debating proposals on how to handle the dwindling stock of IPv4 addresses. I get the distinct impression that some people will still be tabling proposals and discuss the issue long after the last IPv4 block has been allocated by IANA and even the RIR’s themselves.

May 7th we learned that two /8’s had been allocated to RIPE, the European Regional registry. Rumour has it that APNIC is also getting a couple very soon, as well as ARIN. If this materializes only nine ‘slash eights’ will be left to distribute. Depletion clocks are being adjusted; on May 12th Potaroo predicted September 9, 2011 to be the fatidic day for IANA depletion and that on April 8, 2012 the ultimate surviving little block living in liberty will be allocated.

Axel Pawlik, the CEO of RIPE, who is also chair of the NRO provided following rather telling updates on IPv4 and IPv6 address depletion and allocations in a blog for the EGov Monitor:

•During Q1 2010, APNIC, the RIR for the Asia Pacific, allocated nearly 27 million IPv4 addresses to its members, more than any RIR has ever issued in a single quarter.
•APNIC issued 186 IPv6 allocations in the first quarter of 2010 – that is more allocations in three months than it has ever made in any single year.
•For only the second time, LACNIC, the RIR for Latin America and the Caribbean, issued more IPv4 address space than ARIN, the RIR for Canada, many Caribbean and North Atlantic islands and the United States.
•Overall, the five RIRs saw an increase of nearly 30 per cent in the amount of IPv6 address space allocated in 2009, which is an encouraging sign that more organizations are preparing for the transition from IPv4 to the new addressing

At the ARIN meeting and yet again at the Canarie- BCnet annual conference in Vancouver we presented the final recommendations of the Canadian IPv6 Task Group urging all stakeholders to seriously start moving.

It was refreshing to see at least one of the Canadian ISP’s indicate that movement is afoot to start commercial deployment within months.

It will be interesting to keep an eye on NRO numbers during summer recess.

This post originally appeared on CircleID.

Mid-March a special plenary session of the Canadian standard committee isacc was convened in Ottawa to review the final report of the Canadian IPv6 Task Group. It was unanimously approved and the essence of its 66 pages are seven recommendations for Government,  Industry, Service and Content providers, and the regulator, CRTC to proceed with diligence, even some sense of urgency.

One paragraph provides an interesting new twist to the exhaustion debate: Is the Internet already becoming less reliable as a consequence?  Paragraph 3.1 of the report says:  

Evidence has shown that most of the remaining IPv4 address space is already in use by organizations. Within the few remaining IPv4 address blocks available as of January 2010, 90% of that address space contains prefixes  which have been identified as already in use by some organizations, resulting in decreased reliability. Therefore, the recipients of these prefixes, when allocated, will see unwanted traffic to their networks and many organizations will not be able to reach these recipients’ networks.  In other words, the remaining address space will be less reliable to use than the IPv4 address space already in use. As the remaining address space approaches zero, it is likely that people will experience unreachability of sites and networks as well as more instability in IPv4 routing.

Could we be using dirty prefixes without knowing it? What are the possible consequences?

How do we make sure we get clean addresses from our ISP?  Marc Blanchet’s blog on the topic might provide some beginnings of an answer.

If you consider that the IPv4 address pool has only 24 prefixes (/8’s) left and that 22 of them are dirty, means only two really clean ones are left!  The dirtiest neighbourhoods are 1.0.0.0/8, 2.0.0.0/8 and 100.0.0.0/8 , they’re apparently harbouring nests of address squatters.   

An IPv4 dirtyness index might be a useful addition to the expiry counters. A healthier alternative however might be to start dipping in the IPv6 reservoir.

This post originally appeared on CircleID.

The POPClock tells us that there are 6,807,230,170 of us on this planet when I looked it up at 22:26 UTC (EST+5) Feb 26, 2010. In the meantime we are about to connect the 5 billionth cell phone user this year according to ITU Secretary-General Dr. Hamadoun Toure. At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona he also mentioned that the current recession hardly put a dent in the subscriber growth. Gartner Research shows 1.2 billion cell phones sold in 2009, down 0.9 from the previous year but a strong growth in smart phones which saw sales of 172.4 million units growing by 23.8% for the year, 58% in the fourth quarter only! On the network side, a February 26th press release from the GSA association announced that 59 operators in 28 countries are now committed to LTE compared to 39 operators in 19 countries six months ago. A further 16 operators are running technology trials. By the end of 2010 22 LTE networks will have entered commercial service. The first two commercial LTE networks were launched last December in Sweden and Norway. And let us not forget Mobile Wimax which is also gaining some momentum.

As Global Insight speculates, we are indeed likely to see the smart phone war starting to get more acrimonious in 2010 as software platforms and manufactures slug it out, hopefully to the benefit of the consumer. Mobile web browsing for the masses should not be that far away as smart phone prices start dropping seriously. On the network side we are likely to witness a titanic battle amongst mobile network operators trying to walk the fine line between the cost of G4 licenses and network upgrades, affordable end-user pricing, growth in market share and EBITDA. The only certainty is a decoupling between the growth in traffic volumes and the growth in revenue.

As markets and technologies evolved so fast it was rather interesting to see the sudden scramble on how to do voice and SMS over LTE. The most basic, and let us admit, most lucrative, services seemed forgotten in the data deluge. Would it be Volga (Voice over LTE with generic access) using existing circuit switched networks or would it be One Voice which is IMS based with real VoIP calls. One Voice now seems to be gaining the upper hand.

IMS implies addressable IP addresses, lots of them, no need to say more.

Time has come for an IPv6 address population clock to complement the
IPv4 address exhaustion clock .

This post originally appeared on CircleID.

As Neptune’s trident has struck Port Alberni this December 8th 2009 he must have remembered the day more than a century ago when the All Red Line was completed close by at the Bamfield Cable Station in October 1902. The first Global network circling the Globe, projecting the might of the British Empire and Neptune’s first globe spanning copper belt.

I would suspect that not many current Tata Communications employees formerly from Teleglobe are aware that the Canadian All Red landing stations became part of what one day would become the COTC (Canadian Overseas Telecommunication Corporation) renamed Teleglobe in 1975. No current employee, for sure, remembers that the initial cable station was in Bamfield on Vancouver Island. The Bamfield Marine Centre happens to be located on the old cable station property and its website provides some interesting tidbits. The original cable station was constructed in 1902, with the underwater telegraph cable laid in October of the same year by the cable ship Colonia and operated by the Eastern Pacific Board (EPB). The cable ran nearly 4,000 miles across the Pacific from Bamfield to Fanning Island, an atoll in the mid-Pacific which the British annexed specifically for that purpose as they wanted the cable completely on British territory. From there the cable continued to Fiji, New Zealand and Australia. We further learn that The Canadian Pacific Railway Company constructed the Cable Station plus Bachelors Quarters and Manager’s House in 1901-1902, and that on November 1st 1902, the first two telegraph messages to encircle the globe were relayed. In 1926, a second building was constructed and at the same time, a second cable was laid via Hawaii to Suva, Fiji.

In 1950 the Canadian Government nationalized international telegraph cable assets and formed COTC taking over the Bamfield Cable Station. In 1953, the two cables were extended up the Alberni Canal and in 1959, a new state-of-the-art cable station was built in Port Alberni and the Bamfield Cable Station was shut down. The last messages were sent from Bamfield on June 20th, 1959.

The next highlight would take place in late 1963 with the inauguration of the British Commonwealth COMPAC, the first global cable system suited for telephony landing in Port Alberni. COMPAC was to a certain extent a post colonial successor of the Imperial All Red Line. The idea was to link the UK, South Africa, Sri Lanka, India, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and back to UK with an undersea telephone cable system ringing the world. For the Canadian portion of the ring, Teleglobe, still called COTC in those days, completed the transatlantic Cantat-1 in 1961 while the Trans Canada portion was microwave based and installed by Canadian Pacific Railways across the continent all the way to Vancouver Island. HRH, Queen Elisabeth inaugurated the COMPAC system with a call to Australia. The capacity of COMPAC was 80 telephone circuits and one telephone circuit could carry 22 telegraph channels!

Then came ANZCAN in 1984, as a replacement for COMPAC. The cable had a capacity of 1,380 telephone circuits, quite amazing compared to COMPAC twenty years earlier. The Canada-Hawaii portion of good old ANZCAN went into retirement in 1997.

The crowning achievement and grand finale at Port Alberni was the installation and activation of TPC-4 in 1992. This cable pioneered deep-sea cable branching as two cables, one leaving from Port Alberni and one from Point Arena north of San Francisco in California, joined together with at a deep-sea junction and continued as one cable to Chikura in Japan. Naysayers at the time said such undersea branching would never work but business and political considerations plus the persuasion of our VP Engineering at the time, Martin Fournier, prevailed. Needless to say that today, undersea branching is common place.

The early days of 1997 then saw TPC-5 coming on-line with two landing points in the USA, one at San Luis Obispo, California and the Northern landing at Brandon, Oregon. By then the political imperatives to have a landing point within Canadian waters had all but vanished in the context of competition, efficiency and liberalization of the telecom market. It made more economic and business sense to connect terrestrially to Bandon. The days of¨Port Alberni as a cable landing station were counted. It was a matter of how long TPC-4 would still continue to be commercially viable. Marking the end of an era, TPC-4 was decommissioned late 2003 and for the first time in more than a century no transpacific cable traffic reached or left the Canadian shores.

In the fall 2004 the cable station was sold to the University of Victoria for a most worthwhile project. The Neptune initiative is run by a consortium of university and scientific organizations, lead by the University of Victoria and received its first funding in 2003. University of Victoria bought the former Teleglobe cable landing station building on Mallory drive. The 800-kilometre cable network launched this month starts and ends in Port Alberni describing a 800 km long ring at the ocean bottom. The cable was specially built by Alcatel as it has non conventional power requirements for sensor arrays, cameras, hydrophones, automated submarine robotic vehicles and the like. How many telegraph channels could the 10 gigabit backhaul to UVic carry?

It is rejuvenating and most enjoyable to see Teleglobe’s two former cable landing stations used for natural sciences especially in these days of growing concern about global warming and sustainable development of the planet; I look forward to see the science produced by Neptune and to stream some ocean views to my laptop screen or my smartphone.