The last day of ENOG 1 meeting addressed two themes: RIPE NCC activities and the World IPv6 Day. The RIPE Day enabled the conference participants to explore organization of the process of decision making at various RIPE NCC working groups. The meeting was crowned by recapping on results of the World IPv6 Day, which this year de facto became the starting point of the users and providers’ mass transition to the new, modern, IPv6 protocol in lieu of the exhausted IPv4 protocol.
The RIPE Day
The RIPE Day is an entirely new initiative and the first event ever held by RIPE NCC in Russia at the ENOG meeting. Gert Doering, chairman of the RIPE Address Policy Working Group, was the first to address the attendees. The Address Policy Working Group develops policies relating to management and registration of Internet addresses and routing identifiers. Today, the Address Policy Working Group discusses many various recommendations related, first of all, to the most efficient ways of transition to Ipv6 protocol.
The RIPE NCC Services Working Group was the next to be presented to the attendees. It is co-chaired by Kurt Erik Lindquist and Bijal Sanghani. This working group deals exclusively with services, which RIPE NCC provides to LIRs (Local Internet Registries).
The RIPE NCC Measurements, Analysis and Tools Working Group was the last to be presented to the participants. Its chair is Christian Kaufmann. While presenting this working group, Daniel Karrenberg, the RIPE NCC senior researcher, related to the attendees about ongoing development in RIPE of users’ tools RIPEstat and RIPE Atlas designed for control of scaling the transition of various companies to IPv6 in real time. Pavel Khramtsov, the RU-CENTER leading analyst, in his turn, related about the Russian experience of assessing statistical data regarding transition to the new protocol.
The World IPv6 Day
The World IPv6 Day is the day when some major global companies, Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, YouTube, Akamai, among others, will offer their IPv6-enabled content for a 24-hour “test flight”, along with the traditional access to IPv4 protocol. The main purpose of the World IPv6 Day is to test the Internet’s preparedness for transition to IPv6 protocol, as well as speeding up and synchronization of this process by various global companies.
Right before the panel, which dealt with the World IPv6 Day, the Coordination Center for TLD RU held its own press conference where Andrei Robachevsky, ISOC, briefed journalists upon the essence of transition to the new protocol and challenges associated with this process. Specifically, A. Robachevsky noted that the main issue of transition to IPv6 is connected to the fact that old and new protocols are incompatible and many companies are not eager to make transition to IPv6, first of all, due to the fear of loosing that segment of the market, which so far uses solely the IPv4 protocol. Hence a decision to keep both protocols operable during next 10 years and phase out IPv4 while the majority of companies are switching to the IPv6 protocol. The World IPv6 Day is aimed at speeding up the global joint corporate transition to the new protocol. The conference participants were also able to watch a video-port from the IPv6 day, which was held at that moment in Amsterdam.
Notwithstanding some major providers plans to provide direct access to IPv6 for only 24 hours, many content providers can continue to operate the dual stack of Ipv6 and Ipv4 on their websites. This happened after national IPv6 days in the past, and, according to experts, the same will happen after the World IPv6 Day.
“The speed of the data transmission over protocols IPv4 and IPv6-enabled websites today, according to our assessment, is almost identical, - noted Daniel Karrenberg in conclusion. – a 24 hours “test flight” will end tonight and detailed test results will be posted on the RIPE NCC website in the coming weeks.”
“On the whole, the World Ipv6 Day turned out, as we thought, to be pretty boring, - joked D. Karrenberg while winding up the meeting. - We can already argue that the new protocol is stable and there were no special problems related to its launch during the Day.”
