Public participation site

Yesterday's presentations by Alex Le Heux, João Damas and Gert Döring inspired an interesting discussion on IPv6 deployment issues. The session transcript has been published on the main meeting web site and a video archive of the discussion will be made available for download some time next week. Here are some key points from the discussion:

• About one third of TLDs already have IPv6 active for at least one of their nameservers

If the number of uniquely numbered network interfaces connected to the Internet continues to grow at the rate we've been seeing for the last few years the free pool of IPv4 addresses will be exhausted and a new address space will be required. That address space is IPv6 and the RIRs have been allocating it to ISPs since 1999.

Although the 6bone IPv6 testbed network was officially closed on 6 June 2006, deployment of IPv6 on production networks is not yet widespread.

A discussion about the status of IPv6 deployment in policy, ISP and DNS operator environments. Three short presentation will be followed by a discussion between the panelists and participants, both at the meeting venue and participating through the chat and comment functions on this web site.

The Internet currently uses a protocol called IPv4 which provides 4.2 billion individual addresses on the Internet. However, due to the Net's explosive growth, these addresses are rapidly running out and so ICANN is trying to help foster a move toward IPv6 which will provide trillions and trillions of addresses. The problem is that for IPv6 to take hold there has to be a global upgrade of the Internet infrastructure - something that is incredibly difficult to organise.