This March issue of 6Sense, the International Newsletter of the New Internet, includes white papers from Juniper and Ericsson, thoughts on The Next Generation IP Network from Spirent, and my thoughts on ten ways to accelerate IPv6 adoption. I am especially pleased to have Dr. Lawrence Roberts' top five lessons learned from the ARPANET applicable to IPv6. There is a saying that the wise learn from the mistakes of others, while the foolish don't learn from their own mistakes. What can we say of a nation that has not learned from one of the greatest successes in its history, the Internet?
 
For only $50 million or so in US federal funding we had an economic boom that increased federal tax revenues from $1 trillion in 1990 to $2 trillion in 2000, with 1/3rd to 1/2 of that growth attributable directly or indirectly to the Internet. In other words, $50 million invested in the old Internet by the federal government returns about $500 billion a year, every year (and growing) to the federal government alone - a million percent return, every year. Or, put another way, the Dept. of Defense has paid for itself, forever, and is in fact a profit center. I have called this the Greatest Return On Investment in history. In contrast, the US has invested $50 billion in Egypt (a thousand-fold over what was invested in the Internet), with no measurable return. A thousand similar major “investments for no return” scenarios could be presented that compare unfavorably with the Internet investment.
 
Now, in 2005, we have an opportunity to again invest a small amount in the New Internet to reap large rewards in the future. Since everyone knows how much power can come from Internet advances, we can even go further. That's because we can share the cost of investing in the Internet with America's allies or Coalition Partners. That's part of the logic motivating the Coalition Summit for IPv6, which will be held May 23-26, 2005.  We hope to get representatives from the top 20 companies and top 20 to 40 military partners of the US to discuss three possibilities:

1. A way for the US Department of Defense and its components to coordinate the IPv6 Capable certification process with industry, so that network interoperability can be assured in a timely manner, without the confusion of programs that imply they speak for the Dept. of Defense.

2. A way for the 150 or so agencies of the federal government to coordinate with and learn from the Dept. of Defense experience in IPv6, exploring the possible benefits of speaking with one voice on certification, interoperability, and even potentially volume procurement, to reduce the overall costs of moving to IPv6 compared to those of proceeding in an uncoordinated and patchwork fashion.

3. A way for the 50 or so coalition partners of the US to explore the possibility of synchronizing their IPv6 migration schedules and sharing the costs and benefits of certification, and even potentially their research, development and deployment.

The cost to fully transition to IPv6 could end up being hundreds of billions of dollars. Imagine if there were a way to save a major part of this by coordinating actions and purchases. That's part of the potential of the Coalition Summit for IPv6. Though there are around 100 million companies in the world (mostly sole proprietorships), only a tiny fraction of these companies have the depth and breadth of IPv6 expertise to contribute significantly to these discussions, and representatives from many such companies will be in attendance at this event.
 
For more information on the Coalition Summit for IPv6, see coalitionsummit.com. The Coalition Summit for IPv6 is organized by IPv6 Summit, publishers of this newsletter, and organizers of the IPv6 Summits in San Diego (June 03), Arlington (Dec. 03), Santa Monica (June 04), and Reston (Dec. 04). The Coalition Summit for IPv6 will be held May 23-26, 2005 at the Hyatt Regency, in Reston, Virginia (the same venue as our US IPv6 Summit last December). We hope that you will register today and join us in late May for several great conversations, with over 50 great speakers and panelists, and dozens of coalition partners. Please feel free to write me at alex@usipv6.com or call at 310-717-7745 if you'd like further information.

Sincerely,

Alex Lightman
CEO, IPv6 Summit, Inc.

Between 1967-1969, I was at ARPA, where I designed, obtained funding for, and managed the development and installation of the ARPANET. Capitalizing on its initial success, I expanded the network to 23 nodes by 1973. Over the years, the initial network has doubled in size annually, growing into the Internet as we know it today.  The ARPANET facilitated the largest positive impact on the US economy of any government R&D project ever attempted.  However, as the Internet continues to take over virtually all communications, the US is falling behind other countries. There are many improvements still necessary, such as security and QoS. By re-examining history, perhaps we can determine how to move forward to create these improvements and strengthen the US economy.

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Abstract:
This article puts the analysis of the overall generic profitability of IPv6-based products or services into the context of a) investment analysis, and then b) an evaluative technology adoption in phases. Whereas it cannot serve as an argumentation for a specific product or service, or its migration, it encapsulates the key factors in a structured way, and weighs them against each other. It also assesses the relative merits of IPv4 and IPv6 as a basis for comparison, and points out the role played in the investment analysis of the time bases for the IPv4 and IPv6 introductions. Using simplifications, some key overall conclusions can be made showing that over the technology deployment cycle, IPv6 is bound to have both profit enhancing and profit risk reduction properties. A non-exhaustive list is given in the incremental deployment phase for some additional or new revenue sources. Any specific return on investment analysis for a specific product or service would have to meet a number of assumptions listed herein, and would depend on the availability of full specific data.

Preamble:
This paper does NOT address specific technical issues, largely reported elsewhere, e.g., by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) or the IPv6 Forum. It focuses only on the generic profitability issues related to IPv6 deployment, and employs a quantitative approach.
 
From the historical perspective, the reader is reminded that IPv4 and its forerunners required, research, product engineering, migration, and then deployment – just as IPv6 does now!
 
The implications on the business values and models of IPv4 address exhaustion are not discussed, but the reader is referred to Reference 3 (this explicitly affects some of the operating costs analysed here). Bandwidth usage costs, as well as service provisioning are also not accounted for, but are assumed to be similar for IPv4 and IPv6 in real costs. Specific aspects of bandwidth marginal costs, which are higher for mobile networks, are discussed in Ref. 3 and the calculations therein. Likewise, routing address table growth, NAT operating costs, technical means for migration, security, and privacy implications are not addressed specifically, but are referred to in Ref. 1.

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I recently discussed participation in the Coalition Summit for IPv6 with a number of companies. Some of them were sponsors of past IPv6 Summits we've organized. Others are just getting started with IPv6. Nearly all have the same questions: When will the IPv6 market happen in the US? When will we be able to attribute product sales to IPv6?
 
Many of these companies have invested substantial funds in research, development, testing, and certification, for a period of up to six years, and are now getting upper management pressure to show a return on investment. Several have difficulty in being able to do so, and some say that their companies may stop selling IPv6 products in the US or even temporarily halt IPv6 efforts. The military contractor equivalent is to request a waiver, enabling a company to postpone for a year implementing IPv6 in what is provided to the Dept. of Defense, despite the mandate to include IPv6-capable products in anything that links to the Global Information Grid from October 2003 onwards. The logic of a vicious spiral is set in motion: “I won’t include IPv6 in my products or advertise IPv6,” say the sellers, while buyers are not informed of the opportunities or advantages of IPv6, so they don’t ask for it, leading to a state of affairs in the US in which buyers do not ask for IPv6 and sellers do not offer it.
 
The outcome of a continued stalemate in IPv6 is the lack of a healthy market for IPv6. Larry Roberts indicates in his article in this issue of 6Sense that government must mandate security. I would add: there will be an economic disaster in the US without a government mandate for IPv6 that (as Dr. Roberts also advises) does not have both a carrot and a stick.

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Networks are evolving. Scalability, performance, reliability, security and cost considerations are all driving fundamental changes in network equipment, architecture and even the underlying protocols. Applications are consistently increasing in their functionality and sophistication, and these too are demanding additional capabilities from traditionally passive networks. IPv6 certainly is a key element of the on-going network evolution. IPv6’s increased address space, improved security, simplified configuration processes and its inherent support for mobile users are all factors contributing to IPv6’s inevitable dominance of the Internet. However, it would be extremely shortsighted to assume that this will be the only major change in network architectures over the next few years. Instead, IPv6 will be one of several major new components of the next generation networks.
 
Other new networking enhancements are taking place in parallel with the development of IPv6. These include multicast routing, high availability routing, and Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS). Each of these new paradigms significantly enhances traditional networks in its own way. Each of these must also be acutely aware of the other concurrent changes that are taking place to ensure that they are not disruptive to any other evolutionary process. In particular, these new technologies must support IPv6 in order to survive in the next generation of the Internet. Altogether, these technologies represent the future of IP networks.
 
Multicast Routing
 
Network administrators have ignored the challenges associated with multicast routing for years. Applications have recently emerged that are dependent upon multicast communications. These applications include data casting (stock tickers, news groups, sports scores, etc.), webinars, videoconferences, games and simulations, and distance learning. This means that network architects must now include multicast routing in all future designs and plans.
 
The premier multicast routing protocol is known as Protocol Independent Multicast – Sparse Mode (PIM-SM). This protocol was designed at its inception to be agnostic regarding IP versions. This is the only routing protocol that transparently supports IPv6 without requiring any additional updates or appendices. Furthermore, IPv6 was designed with multicast routing in mind – any IPv6 address that begins with ff designates a multicast group.

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Both service providers and enterprises understand the importance of transforming their approach to networking from opportunistic to strategic and forward-looking. The essential element in this shift is a single, secure, evolutionary IP infrastructure over which all services and applications can be delivered – an approach that Juniper Networks and other technology leaders have defined as “Infranets.”
 
Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) plays a key role in this transformation. Increasing address size from 32 bits to 128 bits creates a virtually infinite universe of possible IPv6 addresses and ensures that Infranets can be expanded both logically and geographically. IPv4's current allocation, in contrast, makes it difficult for service providers and large companies, particularly international ones, to obtain efficient address blocks. That has led to a reliance on network address translation (NAT), which often adds complexity and hampers the performance of advanced services such as voice over IP (VoIP).
 
IPv6 also makes it possible to assign a unique address to virtually any device—mobile phones and PDAs (personal digital assistants) being two recent examples. Thus, IPv6 enables new and advanced applications to be deployed leveraging the same flexible IP connectivity.
 
In addition, IPv6 provides a range of operational benefits including: hierarchical addressing for simplifying privacy; stateless auto-configuration for dynamic host address assignment; simplified routing hierarchy for better route summarization and less data fragmentation; more flexible protocol extensions; and, inherent support of IPSec.
 
While the long term benefits of IPv6 are widely understood, deployment demands that any IPv6 implementation meet several immediate criteria.

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VIEW COMPLETE WHITE PAPER [PDF]

Publisher's Intro

The Top Five Lessons Learned from the ARPANET Applicable to IPv6
Dr. Lawrence G. Roberts,
CEO, Anagran Inc.

IPv6 Return on Investment (ROI) Analysis Framework
Prof. L-F Pau, Rotterdam School of Management, Netherlands; and Ericsson Core Networks, Sweden

Ten Ways to Advance IPv6 Adoption in the US and its Coalition Partner Nations
Alex Lightman,
CEO, IPv6 Summit, Inc.

The Next Generation IP Network
Bill Kine,
Product Manager, Spirent Communications

IPv6 and Infranets
Adapted from a Juniper Networks White Paper

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Coalition Summit for IPv6 2005
Reston, VA

The event focuses on COLLABORATION, using the power of the New Internet ...

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