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 The
US IPv6 Summit 2004 was an outstanding success from
many perspectives, and my staff and I were overwhelmed
and delighted to receive over 400 compliments from
speakers, attendees, and sponsors. The IPv6 community
is growing into a very positive, constructive, supportive
team of teams, which is exactly what is needed to
build a new network of networks under, over, and alongside
the IPv4 network of networks. The key takeaway is
that IPv6 is firmly established as an inevitable reality,
so much so that it's now hard to imagine that press
coverage only three years ago called IPv6 "the
foreign Internet".
IPv6, and IPv6 leadership, is now the new way America
will impress the world, while creating hundreds of
opportunities for cooperation and confidence building
between federal agencies, companies, and countries.
From what I saw at the US IPv6 Summit, the greatest
advantage of IPv6 is that it gives great people a
whole new warehouse of opportunities to build great
teams together.
Speakers and panelists were outstanding in the quality
of their thinking and presentations, as well as in
their stature and the value of their contributions.
The participants spoke enthusiastically about how
much they loved the presentations. Speakers, take
a bow. Your audience really, really liked you, what
you had to say and the way you said it!
The US IPv6 Summit 2004 attracted active participation
from military, government, industry, academia, and
nonprofits, mostly from the US, but also from other
countries, including Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan,
Singapore, Israel, and South Korea. A very healthy
mix of people from different organizations and cultures
enabled attendees to broaden their IPv6 community
of friends to include many new people and places.
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The news media picked up on several stories from the
Summit, including the return of the Dept. of Defense
to Internet leadership for the first time in 19 years,
the critical need to budget more for the IPv6 transition,
and the inclusion of IPv6 in Microsoft Windows Longhorn.
Given that the main news for IPv6 in the previous
quarter was that Nokia had demonstrated an IPv6 telephone,
these news stories reframed IPv6 in the mindsets of
not only the Internet community, but also of the high
technology community in general. The news release
shortly after the US IPv6 Summit that China was launching
its CERNET IPv6 native network became big news to
many people who never cared about IPv6 before. The
gist is that, with the federal governments of both
the US and China supporting IPv6 efforts, it is now
a fair proxy for the world media to judge the relative
competence of the world's two biggest national success
stories.
Attendees were able to see a major improvement in
the availability of products and services with the
emergence of IPv6 in consumer electronics from companies
like Panasonic, which demonstrated cameras with bidirectional
Voice over IPv6. Sony made much of its IPv6 plans,
claiming that it would have all 70,000 of its products
IPv6 enabled by 2005. Attendees could see that Panasonic,
with no bold claims, had multiple products, available
now, while no one had seen Sony. That's one of the
great values of having the big event of a new technology:
real companies (with respect to IPv6 at least) demonstrate
salable product (that includes support for IPv6),
and the community of interest gets to see who walks
their talk, and who doesn't.
Here are ten major reasons why the US IPv6 Summit
2004 was a great success:
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There were over 640 Summit attendees (another
60 attended one of the two Dept. of Defense IPv6
Transition Office meetings led by Dr. Charles
(Chuck) Lynch).
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This is the fourth event in a row (including
San Diego 6/03, Arlington 12/03, and Santa Monica
6/04) in which the number of attendees has increased.
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There were over 55 speakers and panelists, many
of them legendary figures in the history of networks
and the Internet, including the four original
fathers of the Internet - Drs. Vint Cerf, Larry
Roberts, Leonard Kleinrock, and Robert Kahn.
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Over 20 speakers and/or panelists related to
the US Dept. of Defense IPv6 transition efforts
presented, including panel Q & A with heads
of the transition efforts for specific branches
of the services.
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The keynote presentation by Dr. Linton Wells,
the CIO and Assistant Secretary of the Dept. of
Defense, put IPv6 efforts into the larger context
of DoD activities and budgeting during the ongoing
Iraq conflict.
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The keynote presentation by Dr. Charles Lynch
included the first major summary of the Dept.
of Defense's DISA IPv6 Transition Office plan.
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ICANN chairman Dr. Vint Cerf gave a keynote presentation,
followed by a presentation on IPv6 administrative
issues by ICANN CTO John Crain.
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DITO and SI International personnel presented
core aspects of the DISA IPv6 Transition Office,
including the "IPv6 Capable" definition
and standardization efforts with vendors to come
up those products and services.
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The 6 Star Partner Program was announced. This
will give extra recognition and credit to those
companies that not only sell IPv6, but also use
it themselves and support others in using IPv6.
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The IPv6 Association was announced. This will
serve as a nonprofit entity (headquartered and
incorporated in the US) that supports the coordination
and harmonization between the requirements of
the Dept. of Defense (and other entities of the
US government, as well as coalition partners)
and the awesome powers of industry and research
centers to evolve and develop products, service
and industry around IPv6.
On a personal note, I greatly enjoyed the presentations
on IPv6 and sensornets from Booz Allen Hamilton, and
on testing of IPv6 networks from Spirent. These and
many other wonderful and informative presentations
are all posted online at www.usipv6.com.
We were also fortunate to have the active participation
of Juniper, which supplied the IPv6 routers to China's
now world famous IPv6 network, and is now actively
pursuing leadership in the IPv6 community. Lucent
impressed me with its coherence and enthusiasm for
IPv6. In sum, I feel a welling of enthusiasm and excitement
about IPv6 from all the people who came to this Summit,
one that I hope that you can feel from this article,
even if you couldn't be there yourself. If you want
to participate and get a great sense of where the
IPv6 community is and where it is going, in the US
and around the world, please mark the dates of May
23-26, 2005 off on your calendar. That's when we will
be building on the momentum of the last four IPv6
Summits that our team organized - we will be holding
the first Coalition Summit for IPv6. We will continue
to have the world's greatest IPv6 related speakers
from government, industry, academia, and the nonprofit
world, while extending the invitation to attend to
over 50 other countries that cooperate and coordinate
their military and homeland defense efforts with the
US. We sincerely hope that you will add your voice
and perspective to that event.
Respectfully,
Alex Lightman
Chairman, US IPv6 Summit 2004
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