The mystery behind IPv6

IPv6 – it sounds like something only a network administrator can understand, or care about. However, this internet standard is the key to building better business in South Africa and driving change for the economy, writes JOHN EIGELAAR.

Currently Romania leads the way in global adoption of the IPv6 standard at 7.8% and the United States sits at only 4.2%, according to the Akamai State of the Internet Report 2014. And South Africa? 0.14% adoption. Thing is, few people understand what this standard is, much less what value it can add. The lack of adoption isn’t causing issues today, but those are incoming with speed.

IPv6 is essentially the new internet protocol designed to replace IPv4. The latter is running out of addresses and as it carries over 90% of the world’s internet traffic today, that’s not great news. When the IP addresses run out, there is no way to connect devices to the internet. Your phone, computer, fancy fridge – all these gadgets that use the internet to update and gather information require an IP to identify and locate them. IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses which allows for a lot of big mathematical numbers and addresses as opposed to the 32-bit used by IPv4 today. The best analogy for comprehending the size of IPv6 is that if you were to give an IP address to every grain of sand on Earth you would not run out.

With IPv6 you can distribute your addresses and allocate an IP to every single device behind your router. Your toaster, your trousers, your shoes and your hat – if they can connect to the internet you can give them an IP. Think of how you used to work with your printer ten years ago compared with today. Now your printer is connected to the network and you can just print from anywhere and any device. In 2008, Keystone had 16 people in the office and around 50 IP addresses and today, there is the same number of staff but suddenly the IP addresses have quadrupled to 200. Same people, same infrastructure, same services, but the volume of connected devices has grown exponentially. The demand for addresses today has led to typical IPv4 problems where you have to segment networks: add more routers and battle to scale the network effectively. The way that IPc4 networks currently deal with this issue is to divide the IPv4 world into external networks: the internet and the internal network, the home or office LAN. These networks are then traversed through gateway routers and the entire setup works really well for devices that are connecting from an internal to an external network. However, the reverse needs complicated router configurations to manage seamlessly and IPv6 removes these issues in one.

Shifting to the new standard can revolutionise the way organisations plan the network and interact with it, but at the moment it is purely academic here in South Africa. There has been no pressure to change over and even though the new protocol can be administered here and it is very simple to run you cannot get an IPv6 prefix from any of the local ISPs. What needs to happen is for the local infrastructure to unleash IPv6 to allow for improved networking, security and connectivity. Over the next two to three years the lack of IPv6 infrastructure is going to make itself felt and there needs to be a commitment from the South African ISP in terms of roll out and support.

* John Eigelaar, Director and co-founder of Keystone Electronics

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