The Honorable Donald Rumsfeld & Alex Lightman discuss IPv6 at the Los Angeles World Affairs Council luncheon on August 4, 2005.                   More Photos

It's Tuesday, August 10, 2005, as I introduce this issue of 6Sense, the international journal of the IPv6 community, and it's a historic date for two reasons. The first is that today is the tenth anniversary of Netscape, Inc.'s public offering, the official launch of the Internet industry, and what historians will call the IPv4 industry. The second is that today is the date of the sale of the company I started two years ago, IPv6 Summit, Inc. (publishers of 6Sense), to Innofone.com, Inc. (IMEN.OB) and I became the CEO and chairman of Innofone.com, the first public company focused on IPv6.

I'd like to think that this launches the IPv6 industry as distinct from the IPv4 industry. It might be interesting to hear from readers whether they think there will be an IPv6 industry and when it might become larger (first in packets, then in revenues, then in earnings) than the IPv4 industry, if ever.

I'm excited about the US IPv6 Summit 2005, which we've scheduled for December 7-9 at the reliable Hyatt Regency in Reston, Virginia, where we held the US IPv6 Summit 2004 and the Coalition Summit for IPv6 in May. The IPv6 hearings chaired by Congressman Tom Davis (R-VA) on June 28 prompted the announcement by the Office of Management and Budget on June 29 of forthcoming federal guidelines. The team at 6Sense was thrilled to read the August 2 OMB guidelines, which we have included as our first story, below.

We are also pleased to present the update on IPv6 transition efforts at the US Air Force from Eric Lubeck and Daniel Eickmeier. Getting Dept. of Defense-related articles takes a number of approvals, and we are grateful to the US Air Force for making great efforts to communicate with the rest of the DoD and the IPv6 community. The DoD IPv6 Transition office in DISA and the three service branch transition offices are the archetypes for the upcoming federal IPv6 transition efforts, as they've “been there, done that” for the first phases of IPv6.

Dr. Chuck Lynch is the Technical Director for the DoD IPv6 Transition Office and, by multiple accounts, a leading candidate to assist OMB with the federal-wide transition to IPv6, and perhaps to help establish a Federal IPv6 Transition Office if one is set up. In this issue, he writes in his capacity as an Adjunct Professor at George Mason University, and asks us to stretch our minds to allow for a new Internet paradigm that respects yet transcends the limitations of the old one.

We have two conference reports related to IPv6 this month, something I'd invite readers to provide more of. (I'm amazed that no IPv6 conference organizers prepare and send executive summaries for us to publish. Are they trying to keep IPv6 a secret?) Arvind Krishnamoorthy provides a good summary of the temperature of the IPv6 community, based on his experiences at the Coalition Summit for IPv6. 6Sense staffer Chris Harz brings back his insights from a Net-Centric Operations/Warfare conference in Bonn, Germany.

On this historical day, John Lee gives his insights into historical aspects of IPv6 adoption, the past, while Steve Silberman talks about IPv6 addressing possibilities, the future.

I hope you enjoy this issue and will join us at the US IPv6 Summit this December in Reston. See http://www.usipv6.com for more details or call 310-458-3233.

Keep your TiVo on Lou Dobbs for the next few days. Congressman Tom Davis and I will be in segments related to the IPv6 hearings in the very near future.

In closing this intro, I'd like to thank my hosts at the Korean IPv6 Summit 2005, which was held recently in Seoul. We will be summarizing that event, and the amazing Internet leadership results of some very smart people in Korean industry and government, in our September issue of 6Sense. Stay tuned for big news as IPv6 emerges in coming months!

Sincerely,

Alex Lightman
Publisher, 6Sense Newsletter

Air Force planners envision a network-enabled future where every Airman, aircraft and piece of equipment across the Air Force network will be IP addressable. The transition to IPv6 is a critical enabler providing decision superiority, greater speed and greater precision in the conduct of net-centric operations in the global ground, air and space domains.

Air Force Transition Organization and Management

The Air Force transition from IPv4 to IPv6 will require a comprehensive transition management plan and a supporting organizational structure to effectively oversee the breadth of the task. The scope of the transition extends to every Air Force system, network, program, device or component that uses IP in any manner. It includes communications infrastructure and applications as well as the rapidly expanding IP addressable devices within sensors and weapon systems. Initially, thorough assessments and tests are needed to ascertain required engineering, procurement, testing, implementation and budget actions. As such, an Air Force IPv6 Transition Management Office (TMO) has been established under the direction of the Air Force Communications Agency with oversight by the Air Force CIO (AF-CIO).

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Innophone.com Inc. announced on August 9 that it entered into a Stock Purchase Agreement to acquire 100% of the equity in IPv6 Summit Inc. Alex Lightman, founder and CEO of IPv6 Summit, Inc. was appointed Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Innophone.com Inc.

IPv6 Summit, Inc. and its CEO Alex Lightman are among the few recognized leaders of the emerging IPv6 industry. Mr. Lightman has been prominent in organizing IPv6 events and publishing numerous articles on IPv6, and edits and publishes the international periodical on IPv6, the 6Sense newsletter. He strongly supported the US Congressional Hearing on IPv6, held by the Government Reform Committee and chaired by Congressman Tom Davis (who based the hearing title, To Lead or Follow, on Mr. Lightman’s April 6Sense article calling for leadership on IPv6 by the US government). Mr. Lightman testified at the Hearing, held on June 29, 2005; the Hearing in turn led to the announcement by OMB that the Federal government would move to IPv6 by 2008. Mr. Lightman has also been invited to speak at IPv6 events throughout Europe, Japan, China, Korea, Australia, and New Zealand, and has authored over 100 magazine articles related to technology, as well as Brave New Unwired World: The Digital Big Bang and the Infinite Internet, published by Wiley.

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In 1687, Sir Isaac Newton published the Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica. This book, considered to be the greatest scientific book ever written, provided science the laws of physics for more than 200 years. This scientific paradigm survived until Albert Einstein provided a new paradigm with Special Relativity in 1905. If science had decided that Newton’s concepts were to be the only correct worldview, then quantum, singularity, and the unified force theories would be mere pipe dreams.

Very few people realize that it took Einstein over a decade to develop the General Theory of Relativity, based on sound mathematics. In fact, Einstein was well known for his “thought experiments” to demonstrate his theories. What is a thought experiment? It is the ability to assimilate various conditions in your mind to create a new possibility that can be tested in your mind with simple logic. This was Einstein’s hallmark and a true and tested technique of scientists today.

No technology is truly stagnant and, often, complete paradigm shifts are necessary for new capabilities to be brought forth. We are faced with such a situation today. The Information Technology community is generally of the mind that the current paradigm for networking and end-to-end services is the only worldview. They see new technologies as a simple extension of the current paradigm. They find it difficult to assimilate the various aspects of IT, and to do thought experiments to create a new paradigm.

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This article presents a personal perspective on where IPv6 seems to be headed, and is based on impressions gathered at the recent IPv6 Coalition Summit held at Reston,VA.

HIGH LEVELS OF INTEREST AMONG STAKEHOLDERS

The Summit attracted some of the most important movers and shakers capable of influencing the prospects for this technology, including a Congressman, several high ranking generals and key IT decision makers in the US Government and Armed Forces, senior officials from foreign countries with active IPv6 initiatives, and senior representatives from the Networking industry and Internet-related bodies. If the rank and range of the participants could be used as a rough gauge of interest and commitment, then there seems to be a high level of interest in and commitment to IPv6, among the various stakeholders in the technology.

IPv6 CAN’T BE IGNORED

IPv6 is a key, emerging technology that no serious player in the network business can really afford to ignore. There are doubters and nay-sayers whose predictions seem to be based on short-term and local perspectives, and on “big bang”-like arrival expectations that are inappropriate for a technology that has the wide deployment scope of IPv6. However, there are powerful stakeholder communities with deep pockets who see a strong need for IPv6, who are committed to it, and who are proceeding at a steady pace that is appropriate for them. While the pace at which they deploy IPv6 may be driven by budgetary, tactical, and practical considerations, their procurement mandates are real and immediate.

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(This article is dedicated to the late Mr. Jack Kilby, inventor of the Integrated Circuit (IC), who made all of this possible.)

This is the first in a series of articles on IP addressing issues and how they can affect IPv6 deployment. To understand where IPv6 technology and solutions are we need to review the history leading up to IPv6 and utilize a method to quantify, compare and contrast significant issues surrounding the technology. We will first take a look at the concept of the Technology Acceptance Curve (TAC) and how it applies to IPv6. We will then identify several of the technologies and issues leading up to IPv6 and its current state of deployment.

In “Innovation, the Attacker’s Advantage,” Richard Foster explained the S-curve, a qualitative and quantitative method for tracking and analyzing change, performance and other factors. The S-curve has been used by technologists and system engineers to track both performance of systems and the locations of technologies on their life cycle curve, the Technology Acceptance Curve. This article will examine different computer related technologies, IPv6 and IPv4 and how they relate to each other and to the eventual success of IPv6.

The S-curve is a forward-leaning lazy S that is in the first quadrant of a graph. (See figure 1.) The positive x-axis can be time or number of users and is usually a log scale, and the y-axis can be multiple variables such as percentage of systems performance, numbers of IP addresses or numbers of users of IP addresses. To explain how to interpret the S-curve let us review the installation and operation of a new multi-user mainframe or server. The use of the S-curve to look at performance issues is a straightforward graph that starts at zero and ends at 100% utilization. The use of the S-curve to look at Technology Acceptance is not as straight forward or as simple to interpret for a technology like IPv6.

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One fact that is often overlooked is that the first critical addressing problem in the IPv4 space was not the lack of addresses, but rather, the fact that there were too many addresses in the routing tables, leading to a router table explosion. Network addresses were given out almost at random and each network had to be advertised to everyone in the world. This had the advantage that a network could be relocated and communications reestablished very quickly, an important criterion in the original design. However, the processing load on each router and the resulting routing table size were directly proportional to the size of the Internet. Consequently, the original design did not scale.

In the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), lack of scalability is the ultimate insult. The solution to this problem was Classless Internet Domain Routing (CIDR). Large blocks of address space were allocated to large Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Each ISP would then allocate part of that block to lower-tier ISPs or the networks. This allowed each ISP to aggregate many of their customers into one routing advertisement, minimizing both the number of routing advertisements and the resultant processing.

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Network Centric Warfare (NCW), the combat component of what is more broadly termed Network Centric Operations (NCO), appears to be one of the hottest topics in the military and aerospace communities today. It has also been a major topic in the IPv6 community, with major military executives (including the Chief Information Officers of the Army, Air Force and the entire Department of Defense) affirming that the New Internet is a “critical component” of NCW – in other words, that Network Centric Warfare cannot be completely realized without the full implementation of IPv6 throughout the military forces.

The tie-in between NCW and IPv6 is an important one. It is all too easy for technologists to sometimes get lost in their love of the detailed features of the technology itself, and forget the most important part – what benefits it brings to the ultimate customer, which in the military is the warfighter. Analyzing the benefits of IPv6 in the context of NCW offers many insights into what is ultimately possible – and what still remains to be done, with huge challenges in creating the robust and secure mobile multi-layer communications networks that military visionaries see as necessary to modern warfare. NCW is nothing less than a revolutionary approach to what used to be termed command and control, and is now called C4ISR (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance); even the expansion of the older term is symbolic of how the scope and complexity of moving information between all the nodes of the battlespace has grown.

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Publisher's Intro

MEMORANDUM FOR THE CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICERS
Karen Evans
Administrator
Office of E-Government and Information Technology
Executive Office of the President
Office of Management and Budget

What IPv6 Brings to the Fight
Eric Lubeck
Air Force Communications Agency

Innofone.com Enters into Acquisition Agreement with IPv6 Summit Inc.

Newton vs. Einstein
Dr. Chuck Lynch
Adjunct Professor, George Mason University

Reading The IPv6 Thermometer
Arvind Krishnamoorthy
Enterasys Networks

IPv6 and its Position on the Technology
Acceptance Curve, a Historical and Personal Perspective
John L. Lee
Internet Associates, LLC.

Addressing Possibilities for IPv6
Steve Silverman
Houston Associates

Network Centric Warfare: Allied Progress
Christopher Harz
COO, Harz Networks

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December 7-9, 2005

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