Media Release – 12 December 2011

The New Zealand IPv6 Task Force is pleased to announce that New Zealand’s public sector is making steady progress towards greater adoption and usage of IPv6 – the next generation Internet protocol.

The finding follows a series of interviews conducted by the Task Force with a swath of SOEs, Crown entities, core government agencies and tertiary / research institutes. A detailed report on IPv6 adoption within the state-sector has been prepared and can be downloaded here.

The key takeaways from the report are:

• Awareness of IPv6 and of IPv4 exhaustion is high in the government and wider state sector.
• 2012 should see more state sector IPv6 adoption. It appears that 2012 will be the watershed year, in which many organisations anticipate making at least some of their public services available natively on IPv6.
• A large number of state sector organisations are specifying IPv6 readiness in hardware they are buying, or in their hosting / ISP services.
• The majority of state sector organisations are working on enabling IPv6 for their external Internet presences.
• There is an emerging policy thrust by central government to encourage IPv6 adoption, backed by ‘common capability’ services purchasing – for instance, the IPv6-enabled one.govt and IaaS services.
• The most common barriers to state-sector IPv6 adoption remain absence of a business driver, lack of ‘internal champions’, and uncertainty of costs and implementation approaches.

CONFERENCE

The Task Force is also pleased to announce that, in collaboration with the Department of Internal Affairs, it will be convening the “Practical IPv6 for Government” conference on 23 February 2012 in Wellington open to central and local government ICT departments and suppliers.

More information on the conference can be found at
www.ipv6.org.nz/practical-ipv6-for-government/

“2012 will be a critical year for progressing IPv6 uptake in the Government sector. This conference will provide valuable support in that process,” says IPv6 Task Force Convenor Milner.

Requests for registration can be made by emailing rsvp@internetnz.net.nz. “The theme of cost-effective and timely adoption of IPv6 addresses the challenges faced with IPv6 today in ensuring efficient and effective procurement and implementation,” says Milner.

The conference programme will be dominated by practical sessions. Following an hour of keynote addresses, presentations will be given about IPv6 services available to the Government sector including One.Govt, hosting and IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service).

In the afternoon there will be local IPv6 case studies and three discussion workshops targeted at IPv6 Security, LAN/addressing and Publishing Websites.

Conference sponsors so-far are Microsoft, HP (Gold), Cisco Systems, Fortinet, FX Networks (Silver), Allied Telesis, NZRS and Knossos (Bronze). InternetNZ provides secretariat support for the IPv6 Task Force.

For more information contact:

Dr Murray Milner
Convenor
New Zealand IPv6 Task Force
027 443 0120
murray.milner@xtra.co.nz

or

Campbell Gardiner
Secretariat
New Zealand IPv6 Task Force
campbell@internetnz.net.nz
021 50 6004

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About the NZ IPv6 Task Force
The New Zealand IPv6 Task Force is tasked with promoting the adoption of IPv6, assisting with training and education options and implementation planning. The Task Force is aligned with the Global IPv6 Forum, and its work is driven by the impending exhaustion of IPv4 addressing and the associated risk and additional cost that this is expected to impose on New Zealand organisations. More information at www.ipv6.org.nz/about

We are inviting those working in ICT in central or local Government or who supply services to such. The formal invitation is here including how to RSVP.

The theme of “Cost-effective and timely adoption of IPv6″ addresses the challenge we all face with IPv6 today. We’ve heard the message, it’s now about procurement and implementation. We all seek to understand best practice approaches and learn from other’s experiences.

The conference follows and is informed by the release of a detailed Task Force report on IPv6 state-sector adoption in New Zealand available at: http://www.ipv6.org.nz/ipv6-state-sector-adoption/

The conference programme will be dominated by pragmatic sessions. Following an hour of keynote addresses, presentations will be given about IPv6 services available to the Government sector including One.Govt, hosting and IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service). In the afternoon there will be local IPv6 case studies and three discussion workshops targeted at IPv6 Security, LAN/addressing and Websites/WAN.

The draft programme is here. It will continue to be updated closer to the event.

2012 will be a critical year for progressing IPv6 uptake in the Government sector. This conference will provide excellent support in that process.

Please register now as per the formal invitation as there will be a maximum attendance possible.

IPv6 state-sector adoption – Phase 1 Report

The two delivered a presentation focused on recent IPv6 adoption activity in New Zealand. Results from the Task Force’s CIO and supply-side surveys also  featured, as did a progress report on engagement with New Zealand central and local Government.

A copy of the Task Force’s presentation is available here.

The Summit also featured presentations from New Zealand-based fibre provider FX Networks and Internet Service Provider DTS. These can be viewed below:

Eight Hundred and Sixty Eight Days Afterwards – Jamie Baddeley, FX Networks

Catalyst for IPv6 Adaptation – Tim Price, DTS

In between immersing himself in APNIC’s inner-policy workings, he chaired a session of the ‘IPv6 Transition Plenary’, discussing with content providers what they observed on World IPv6 Day.

Dean also presented at the Asia Pacific IPv6 Task Force Meeting, offering up a primer on the state of IPv6 within New Zealand. His trip report contains some useful observations, and is available below.

Technical Convenor – APNIC32 Trip Report

New Zealand’s Research and Education Advanced Network (REANNZ) was one of this country’s earliest adopters of IPv6, having implemented the protocol on its national backbone, dubbed KAREN, in 2006. By the following year the organisation had gone a step further, deploying internally on its office network, DNS,  and video-conferencing system.

The Crown-owned company’s internal transition to IPv6 went off without a hitch. Network Operations Specialist David Brownlie says, for some staff, the address schema took a little getting used to, but turning it on involved a mere four lines of code!

REANNZ is well and truly living IPv6. This way of life even extends to its in-house skills – not only are its network personnel fully-schooled in IPv6, the organisation recently hired a Computer Science graduate who is au-fait with IPv6, having been exposed to the protocol in every year of his course.

Brownlie notes that there can be a degree of tension between IT decision-makers who were brought up in the IPv4 world and those such as REANNZ’s new graduate living in an all-fibre IPv6 world. But, as time goes by, more network professionals, vendors and application developers are becoming familiar with the new protocol. It is then, he says, that adoption will really start ramping up.

More generally, IPv6 is not, nor has it ever been, an option. “Emerging economies in Asia are committing to widespread IPv6 adoption. Given the importance of trade links with the East, New Zealand organisations must follow suit,” says Brownlie.

REANNZ holds a significant amount of IPv6 address space, with two blocks of /32 – one for New Zealand’s research and tertiary education community and one for schools. Address space is provided free to members on sign-up.

The company has about 150 members. Only a dozen of these have deployed IPv6 in any meaningful way – the leaders tend to be large universities and Crown Research Institutes dealing with business partners in Asia.

While REANNZ doesn’t officially provide IPv6 advice as a member service, it assists where possible, and extols the virtues of IPv6 at every turn. But ultimately, says Brownlie, decisions need to be made internally by each member about what is best for their own organisation.

“It is important to align technology objectives with company objectives. In our experience, those of our members who have been early IPv6 adopters have been those with clear thinking about what they’re in the world to do.”

Much of the teeth-gnashing around IPv6 adoption comes down to persuasiveness of business case and cost. “It can be difficult to get big projects signed off unless there is large return on investment. And, what IPv6 adoption amounts to is a substitution of one functioning protocol with another. IPv4 already works, so, for many organisations, it is easy to mask the problem.”

Expense is another hurdle. Some REANNZ members have baulked when seeing the cost involved in wholesale IPv6 adoption. There is large value attached to firewalls, for instance. Many aren’t IPv6-ready and there is significant money involved in switching them out.

Brownlie suggests IPv6-enabling external applications initially and encourages organisations to experiment with the protocol. “At the moment, given the low level of IPv6 uptake, it’s a unique opportunity to multi-home with IPv4 and IPv6 and find out which applications will support IPv6 and which won’t.”

Make no mistake, the IPv4 protocol is nearly 50 years old and is starting to creak. “It’s an anomaly of the technology world that IPv4 has been used for so long. The entire ICT industry is geared towards adopting new technologies, yet we’ve coped for decades with the ancient way of addressing,” he says.

For more information about REANNZ’s IPv6 activity, including practical technical advice, visit: www.wiki.karen.net.nz/index.php/IPv6

Snap Internet Media Release – 26 August 2011

All Snap Internet customers now have native IPv6 connectivity for no additional cost to safeguard them from the threat of IPv4 address exhaustion.

As of this year, no more IPv4 addresses can be allocated from network registries. The numbers of IPv4 addresses available for customers are dwindling and will become costlier as a result.

While other ISPs talk about putting in the new Internet addressing protocol IPv6 Snap has already moved to ensure future connectivity for customers.

Starting this August, Snap’s network is fully IPv6 enabled for all customers. The IPv6 service will run alongside Snap’s normal IPv4 connectivity.

All you need to do is to upgrade to a DSL or other router that’s IPv6 capable and configured properly, and you can start accessing the Internet with the new address protocol. Snap will initially be offering support for IPv6 via email, but will extend this to phone support later this year (Please note that if router configuration and IPv6 troubleshooting is needed, it will be handled by Snap’s Tier 2 Technical Specialists which may be charged)

Mark Petrie SNAP COO says:  “We have been preparing for IPv4 addresses to run out for the past four years, and wanted to ensure that our customers can continue using the Internet without interruption, or further costs. This is hugely important, especially for business customers depending on the Internet.”

As most residential routers presently don’t support IPv6, in a further move to ensure easy migration to the new protocol, Snap will be selling AVM Fritz! Boxes from September. These are fully enabled for IPv6, and pre-configured by Snap.

Commercial customers can get support from Snap too, for help with migrating to the new protocol from Snap’s IPv6 trained staff.

Globally, everyone is getting ready for IPv6 and so should you. Already, many sites on the Internet are fully IPv6 enabled such as Google. In June this year, Google, Yahoo, Facebook and other Internet giants held the World IPv6 Day to kick off uptake of the new protocol, and to test it around the world.

Petrie says “All new operating systems such as Windows, Mac OS X and iOS, and Linux are ready to run IPv6 too. “

Moving to IPv6 means each device can reach others directly on the Internet – this is called the end-to-end principle, and it ensures the best network performance possible, with the least complexity.

Already, the lack of IPv4 addresses has led to extensive use of measures such as Network Address Translation or NAT. However, NAT which uses addresses that cannot be found directly on the Internet breaks the important end-to-end principle and adds complexity, especially for large networks. It may also cause performance issues.

Snap DSL plans for residential users start at $75 a month with broadband and phone, with more available.

To test if you’re connected with IPv6, go to http://test-ipv6.com.

Government initiative:
InternetNZ has graciously provided funding for Donald Clark to work with the IPv6 Task Force on a part time basis through to mid December in order to provide a specific focus on Government adoption of IPv6. The initial focus will be on Central Government agencies and if time permits local and regional agencies will also be included.  The goal is to have one-on-one discussions with the various agencies to determine adoption status and plans.

IPv6 coordinator:
The Task Force coordinator has been working on mapping IPv6 adoption across all sectors of industry in New Zealand. This mapping has resulted from a “State of the Nation” activity, itself based on Task Force survey data, one-on-one interactions and international data.

Another key focus has been the development of benchmark metrics that can be used to compare the progress with IPv6 adoption in New Zealand against that of other jurisdictions. This is no easy task. However, we are now focusing on a few key metrics and commencing the collection of data. The key metrics being considered currently include:

• Number of Government public websites that are IPv6 enabled,
• Number of the Top 20 New Zealand public websites that are IPv6 enabled,
• Volume of IPv6 traffic flowing in New Zealand,
• DNS IPv6 Queries,
• Allocations of IPv6 addresses.

System integrators:
Another area of focus for the Task Force is the System Integrator community operating within New Zealand. To some extent this will be complementary to the Government initiative, but hopefully will also enable us to increase focus on IPv6 adoption within the wider enterprise sector. The aim is to encourage every interaction between system integrators and their clients to include a discussion on IPv6 adoption.

IPv6 events:
There are a number of events coming up, in which the Task Force will be participating, including:

• Australia & New Zealand Internet Awards (ANZIA) – Task Force Convenor Murray Milner has been invited to participate as a judge for the Award related to innovation in IPv6 with the ceremony being held in Melbourne on the evening of 17 October 2011,
• Australian IPv6 Summit – The Task Force has been invited to present at this event to be held in Melbourne from 17-19 October inclusive. Murray and Task Force  Secretariat Campbell Gardiner will present, with support from a number of other participating Task Force members,
• ALGIM Conference – An invitation has been received to deliver a keynote address on the Whitepaper on IPv6 Adoption within Local Government to be held in Taupo on 21 November 2011.

ALGIM engagement:
The Task Force has completed a draft IPv6 whitepaper for ALGIM (the Association of Local Government Information Management). It is planned to release the Whitepaper through a keynote address to be presented by Murray at the ALGIM Conference in Taupo on 21 November this year. The Task Force has also been working with Tauranga City Council on a user case study.

IPv6 Forum:
The IPv4 address pool continues to diminish around the world with RIPE forecast to be the next region to drop below the single /8 threshold early next year.

A visit to the IPv6 Forum web page is well worth the effort from time to time. The front page offers access to plenty of global material on IPv6 applications, deployments and resources.  It also has a meter showing global Internet traffic split between IPv4 and IPv6.

The IPv6 traffic is still not growing rapidly today, but various commentators are expecting a rapid increase over the next few years leading to a forecast of around 50% of global traffic by 2015.

The Internode announcement of availability of IPv6 follows a similar announcement in New Zealand by Northland’s Uber Group. I note that TelstraClear has an evolving story, WorldxChange has been trialing IPv6 to its customers, Inspire Net is active, and FX Networks has been in the IPv6 market for a long time. I can’t wait to see even more come out of the woodwork and compete.

Prior to this embryonic competition, and lacking a Y2K-style deadline to force the issue, it’s been a hell of a job to convince enterprise customers in both corporate and government of the need to build capacity for IPv6 sooner rather than later. The collaborative NZ IPv6 Task Force has been active and these days theawareness is out there but more IPv6 Internet service supply is needed.

When it comes to the domestic market, hiding behind some of the ISP reticence is the Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) issue. While business-level routers are available, reasonably-priced IPv6 equipment for home is not. Naturally, equipment manufacturers want to see demand from ISPs as they re-engineer products, but they’ve had a decade and a half to prepare! They may, however, have a good excuse as the International standards organisation IETF is working on home networking standards for IPv6.

I hope this supply chain is sorted in time for the bulk of the UltraFast Broadband (UFB) network and the Australian NBN network. It will be a crying shame if ISPs are shipping home routers that aren’t compatible with IPv6 as the big migration to the next generation fibre network gets underway.

Note that, at least in New Zealand, the Local Fibre Companies (LFCs) don’t deal with IPv6 themselves as it is a protocol issue above the layers of the Internet that they deal with. Each home here will get a basic network box from their LFC, but the router with the IPv6 on it will be from the ISP or a store like Dick Smith or JB Hi-Fi.

So let’s celebrate these announcements of IPv6 support from ISPs and telcos as they arise, continue to raise awareness of IPv6 and keep the friendly pressure on those dragging the chain.

(originally posted at rwoodnz.net)

Cerf begins by wryly commenting on his choice of the 32-bit IPv4 address space. “I thought 4.3 billion potential addresses would be adequate for conducting the experiments to prove the technology. If it worked, then we could go back and design the production version. Of course, it is now 2011, and the experiment never exactly ended.”

Limoncelli notes that “The biggest decision for many organizations is simply knowing where to begin”. He précis three strategies being used by organisations that are transitioning to IPv6. Those that work, he says, tend to be those that focus on specific applications or Web sites.

In addition, he sketches out a number of “lessons” that Google has learned. Chief among these are avoiding proposals to convert everything to IPv6. These “sound crazy and get rejected”. He also encourages organisations to “work from the outside in” and “propose high-value reasons” to use IPv6.

“[This] is most likely to get management approval. There are no simple solutions, but there are simple explanations. Convert that ‘one thing’ and keep repeating the value statement that got the project approved, so everyone understands why you are doing this. Your success here will lead the way to other projects.”

Finally, Limoncelli issues a word of warning to those who, for years, have been ignoring IPv6. “For a long time IPv6 was safe to ignore as a ‘future requirement’. Now that IPv4 address space is depleted, it is time to take this issue seriously. Yes, really.”

To read the paper visit:
http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1959015