We are two months away from the US IPv6 Summit 2005 and we invite you sign up now. We are pleased to announce in this issue of 6Sense our keynotes, which are a part of approximately 50 speakers and panelists:

• U.S. Senator George Allen (invited)
• Major General Dean Cash (USA, Ret'd), Director of Network Centric Operations Enterprise, Raytheon Systems
• The Honorable Tom Davis, Government Reform Committee, U.S. House of Representatives
• Linton Wells, CIO DoD (invited)
• Major General Marilyn Quagliotti, Vice Director, DISA
• Glenn R. Schlarman, Chief, Information Policy and Technology Branch, Office of Management and Budget
• Capt. Rick Doran, Deputy Assistant Chief of Staff for C4 at Allied Command Transformation (invited)
• Major General Dennis C. Moran, Army CIO/G-6, Architecture, Operations, Networks & Space
• Gerard A. Alphonse, President, IEEE-USA
• Dr. Peter Freeman, Asst. Director, NSF

Companies that are interested in showing support for America's IPv6 transition have the best opportunity of the year by joining Juniper, Spirent, Lucent, NTT Communication, Global Crossing and other authentic leaders of the emerging IPv6 industry and share their insights from years at the frontlines of IPv6 transition.

If you can't wait for two months to get IPv6 information and you live or can travel to the Washington, DC, or Atlantic City, NJ, area, we have two shorter programs to offer.

1. Oct. 19 – MILCOM Panel, Impact of the DoD IPv6 Transition on Federal and Coalition Communications, chaired by Alex Lightman, with panelists Dr. Chuck Lynch, DoD IPv6 Transition Office; John Shipp, Deputy Director, US Army CIO/G6 AAIC; Mark Evans, Navy IPv6 Transition Lead, COMSPAWARSYSCOM; and Eric Lubeck, IPv6 Action Officer, Air Force Communications Agency. Atlantic City Convention Center, Atlantic City, NJ, 3:15 – 5:15 PM
    
   
2. Nov. 4 – Federal CIO Workshop #2, Lead by Dale Geesey of v6Transition, Sheraton Crystal City Hotel, Arlington, VA, 8:30 AM - 4:30 PM.

I recently reflected upon the purpose of our IPv6 Summits, and wanted to summarize why my team and I have poured our hearts and souls into organizing them for the past three years. The IPv6 Summits are for Education, Imagination, Cooperation, Elucidation, Standardization and Transformation. If I had to summarize what I think is most important for the creation of a thriving IPv6 industry strong and smart enough to serve the U.S. federal transition, followed by the shift of a huge part of the annual GDP U.S. economy to IPv6, it comes down to going through the front door rather than the back door.

I’ve observed how more than 100 companies and federal agencies grapple with how to deal with opportunities and challenges of IPv6. Some organizations have shared insights, information and code for the good of the field. Some have sought unelected power, sole sourcing, even petty monopolies of sorts. Others have made backroom deals and managed to avoid openness. The elements are in place for the rise of a new business culture and new government around a new technology. I cannot emphasize enough how important transparency of governance, standards, finances and test results will be in the future.

If you have the power to give business to companies for IPv6, choose companies that will use your funds and IPv6 to grow more transparent and play well with others. If someone tells you they are a leader or an expert in IPv6, ask them where their articles, PowerPoints, contributions or networks they’ve built are, and what they’ve offered back to the field. IPv6 will succeed to the extent that those who read this newsletter, which reaches the majority of people interested in IPv6, give more than they take, and share information openly and generously .

It’s often said that we use less than 10% of our brains. At the moment, I think companies and government agencies in the U.S. (well, everywhere outside Japan and Korea) are doing less than 10% of what they could be doing to make a successful transition to IPv6. It is absolutely inevitable that the vast majority of information, communication and entertainment will flow over IPv6 within one generation. What’s not inevitable is whether this process works well, and provides benefits to all people, companies, agencies and nonprofits commensurate with the great possibilities of IPv6.

In this October issue of 6Sense we have six interesting articles:

• John Shipp and Dale Geesey provide a concise summary of the past, present, and future of the US Army IPv6 transition, including timeline, strategy, and org chart.

• Tim O'Neill takes us through the process of providing real time validation for IPv6. I wish more IPv6-related companies could write and illustrate like this!

• Peter Sherbin, of Bell Canada, surprises us with his "Powerpoint Archeology" (my term), shifting and sorting through the 6,200+ presentations slides from the past five US IPv6 Summits to see the forest for the trees of IPv6 information.

• John McEachron, affiliated with the Dept. of Interior, provides the first published glimpse into the impact of the OMB guidance on the DOI's IPv6 work. Considering the DOI monitors volcanoes and other powerful fixtures of the U.S., I'm glad that they are using IPv6 to get more information, sooner.

• Marshall Eubanks summarizes multicasting, which looks promised to come into its own as IPv6 becomes the norm, and to make it easier and less expensive to drench the world in video over Internet.

• Barton Reppert's article on emerging interest in IPv6 is reprinted from the IEEE's "Today's Engineer" with kind permission. We welcome the IEEE's involvement and potential leadership in IPv6 applications and think it could be one of the best things to happen to the field. This is the article that, I think, will be seen as the starting point for accelerating the velocity and breath of IPv6 standardization into hundreds of new areas.

If you have comments or would like to submit an article and share your expertise with the IPv6 community, please write me at alex@usipv6.com.

Sincerely,

Alex Lightman
Publisher, 6Sense Newsletter

The Impact of IPv6 for the Army

IPv6 is expected to provide the foundation to solve the fundamental limitations of today's technology which hinders network-centric operations. IPv6 will let data travel efficiently and facilitate delivering "Simplistic Order from Chaos" created by the explosion of information being created, stored and shared realtime across the global battlefield.

The Warfighter is becoming a mobile sensor platform that provides remote total awareness of the operational environment. IPv6 enables the secure automated movement between ubiquitous connection points and enables the warfighter to realize enhancements that will increase operational effectiveness. Examples of areas critical to net-centricity and the Future Force that are being explored for potential operational benefits to the Army include enhanced capabilities for mobility, end-to-end security, multicast and auto-configurations.

The operational tempo of battle today, as recently demonstrated during Operation Iraqi Freedom, is fast paced and highly mobile. IPv6 allows network elements to "break and make" connections in a continuous, seamless manner transparent to the user. With additional IPv6 capabilities, such as auto-configuration and multiple address assignments to an interface, users can roam throughout an extended three-dimensional battle space while seamlessly maintaining communications.

READ ENTIRE ARTICLE

The Department of Interior (DOI) expects the enterprise wide area network to be IPv6 capable in advance of the OMB June 2008 deadline. DOI Office of the CIO (OCIO) staff members have a keen interest in transitioning to IPv6. An expanded addressing capability is only one of the many benefits of an IPv6 implementation. Having a secure network is a top priority for DOI and IPv6 definitely enhances network security.

In addition, IPv6 will expand the capabilities of existing applications and be an enabler for many new applications. As an example, many of the bureaus have applications that rely on sensor data. US Geological Survey (USGS) is one of the eight bureaus and is engaged in a wide variety of activities. As a scientific organization, USGS monitors volcanoes, earthquakes and stream flow activities. USGS gathers data from sensors deployed across the country and around the world. After analysis of the data collected, alerts can be sent to IPv6 enabled devices across the globe.

READ ENTIRE ARTICLE

The lead organizer of an upcoming U.S. industry "summit" conference on Internet protocol version 6 (IPv6) warns that if the United States is merely a follower rather than a leader in implementation of IPv6 and the "New Internet," the results could be devastating for America's global competitiveness.

"The New Internet has the potential to create 10 million new American jobs and trillions of dollars in revenue for the United States, but leadership is slipping away to other countries, and it will soon be difficult, if not impossible, to recover," says Alex Lightman, chair of United States IPv6 Summit, set to be held 6-9 December in Reston, Va. IEEE-USA President Gerard Alphonse is expected to be among speakers at the summit, which will bring together executives from dozens of U.S. and multinational companies involved with Internet development...

READ ENTIRE ARTICLE

Where would you go for cutting edge information nowadays? Probably the next best thing to pro's mind is a PowerPoint capturing its originator's thoughts. Hence a "paronthology" (in Greek 'paron' means 'to present') or a true 21st century art of creating and processing presentations is blossoming on the need to share ideas at ever increasing pace.

But why on Earth would you spend months studying thousands of slides that talk about IPv6? In this case there was a combination of professional interest, excitement and respect. Anyone in the Internet industry can easily project professional interest. The excitement comes from IPv6 astounding address space, which allows networking virtually the whole known universe from molecules to stars. A marvel of that magnitude surely inspires respect. Even better it enthuses to an instant participation.

READ ENTIRE ARTICLE

Internet Protocol (IP) Multicast is a technology that conserves network bandwidth by delivering packets from one or more sources to one or more receivers without unnecessary duplication. Multicast can be compared with unicast (the most common means of data delivery on the Internet, where there is a direct point-to-point sending of information), and anycast (used in services like DNS, where requests are sent from one source to the nearest of a set of servers). Every IP Multicast involves data (such as a video stream) sent to a Multicast address, with the set of receivers for those data being the Multicast group for that address, the Multicast group address.

Multicast applications are centered around timely and cost effective distribution of data, such as the distribution of financial information to analyst's desks or video streaming to a large number of receivers, and are also used for discovery of resources on the network (for example, in the multicast DNS protocol). Multicast can be used on the LAN (where it's now almost ubiquitous), inside Enterprise and campus networks (where it is common) and between networks or on the global Internet (where a lack of deployment limits uses to special situations or advanced networks such as the Internet 2 in the U.S. and similar networks abroad).

READ ENTIRE ARTICLE

IPv4 is being augmented by IPv6. The lack of current IPv4 addresses and the IPv6 promise of easier administration, tighter security and an enhanced addressing scheme are forces that cannot be ignored. The federal government's goal is to complete the transition to IPv6 for all inter and intra networking across the Department of Defense (DoD) and all government agencies by FY 2008 . DoD is already testing IPv6 implementations, and now there is a directive from Office of Management and Budget that all 22 federal agencies must be IPv6 "capable" by 2008.

If you're responsible for a US government network, a primary concern is the impact on your overall network performance as a variety of IPv6 applications are introduced onto your network. Consequently, a systematic and repeatable test methodology is required for measuring the network performance with current and new applications. This article explains the steps of that methodology and how Spirent Federal's ClearSight Network Analyzer can be used to validate the results and substantiate your migration.

You have already made the big decision between building a new network specifically for IPv6 or migrating IPv6 into your current IPv4 network. Now you are ready for the five basic process steps of a new technology implementation:

• Understand
• Decide
• Test
• Deploy
• Manage

READ ENTIRE ARTICLE

IPv6 Summit, Inc., organizers of the US IPv6 Summits for the last three years and publishers of 6Sense, now offers a wide range of training, consulting and implementation support services to make the transition to IPv6 a reality for your organization. We have assembled a team of IPv6 experts and partners into v6 Transition, providing a complete set of solutions to your meet your IPv6 transition planning and implementation requirements.

MORE INFO

Publisher's Intro

The Army IPv6 Evolution
John Shipp and Dale Geesey
United States Army

DOI Advancing on IPv6 Readiness
John McEachron
Consultant,
US Department of Interior,
Office of the Chief Information Officer

IPv6 Transition and the "New Internet"
Barton Reppert
Freelance Science and
Technology Writer

United States IPv6 Summit reveals
new Internet opportunities in North America
Peter Sherbin
Bell Canada

The Basics of Multicasting in
IPv6
Marshall Eubanks
Multicast Technologies

Real Time Validation and Support for IPv6 Implementations using the Spirent Federal ClearSight Analyzer
Tim O'Neill
ClearSight Networks, Inc

v6 Transition Now Offers IPv6 Transition Services

Send us feedback about 6Sense articles

Reston, Virginia

December 7-9, 2005

Click here for more info.