March 2006 Archives

IPv6 is dead, and I think pretty much everyone already knows it. I gave a presentation about IPv6 at TelecomNEXT in Las Vegas last week (full presentation archived here) entitled "Realities of IPv6 as the Future Network Layer". I regard it as a largely straightforward presentation of the facts: IPv6 is used by virtually no one, is not seeing significant adoption and has lost in the marketplace of new ideas. Since we will, in fact, run out of IPv4 address space eventually, and since IPv6 is obviously not the solution that people want for this problem, let's start working on a better one right away. Of course, the presentation contains juicy quotes like:

• "The market has spoken: IPv6 is the wrong technology at the wrong time and most organizations will profit from simply ignoring it"
• "NAT and IPv6 are both evil, but IPv6 is the more dangerous of the two."
• "IPv6 was designed with no migration strategy from the real Internet."

This perspective has been making a lot of people angry, since it implies (or rather, bluntly states) that those who have made significant investments in IPv6 have wasted their money, since we will obviously have to replace it with something else. I think that this conclusion is painfully obvious, but I guess lots of people are still deluding themselves. So who will win and who will lose in the ultimate failure of IPv6?

According to the intrepid reporters over at The Register, Level (3) suffered a significant outage at their London Braham Street Facility due to a leak.

AT&T is going to buy BellSouth and the ghost of Ma Bell looms large in all of our minds. No one is really surprised by this. As usual, this deal is multi-dimensional, with landline, Internet, and cell phone assets all tied up in a complicated set of overlapping bundles. But what does this really mean for the Internet?

More specifically: Do these acquisitions really have anything to do with the Internet at all? What will be the size and scope of these networks when combined? Who will be the winners? We can offer some pretty convincing answers to all of these as well as some wild speculation about the next acquisition to come.