An IPv6 infrastructure will enable the development of novel applications, ones which simply won't work, or that have high overheads, in the presence of obstacles such as NAT. Distributed systems and GRID applications may be among the first to benefit from such an infrastructure. We can also look to other areas such as wireless 802.11b communities, 3G/UMTS networks, and home networking to find application domains that would benefit from adoption of IPv6. Given access to home broadband always-on network access, staff and students will be able to work at home much more effectively, e.g. making use of advanced collaborative conferencing applications, or accessing home services from their office desktops. We should remember that the IPv4 killer application, the Web, was not invented until at least ten years after the Internet was available to the public. We do not yet know the "killer" IPv6 application, but by promoting deployment and gaining early access to the technology, we are more likely to be ready for it to emerge.

There are other pointers to IPv6 adoption. The pan-European IPv6 research network, G?ANT, has a commitment to introduce an IPv6 service within its lifetime (by 2003/04), and two major European IST projects, 6NET and Euro6IX, are now deploying IPv6 native networks spanning many European countries. At least 15 other IST projects are studying aspects of IPv6. The European Heads of State have also released the conclusions of their March 2002 council meeting in Barcelona in which a resolution to improve broadband access, and to progress the adoption of IPv6, was passed. In the US, Internet2 has emphasised the importance of IPv6 and have deployed a native IPv6 infrastructure on the Abilene network and in Japan there are significant drivers for IPv6 through their advanced 3G deployment. Vendor-independent standards groups are increasingly focusing on IPv6 instead of IPv4, for example the bulk of the IETF's Mobile IP work is now IPv6 only.

IPv6 support from commercial vendors such as Cisco, Juniper, Hitachi, Sun, Microsoft, Symbian and Compaq, have taken open source support from Linux and BSD. This means that those wanting to gain early operational experience can do so now, whether for their own staff or to support research activities on their campuses.

It is clear that some of the main components for IPv6 development have been defined by many IPv6 research projects led in the UK and abroad. However further work in particular areas is still required before full-scale IPv6 deployment on production networks is feasible and it is envisaged this will take a few years.

There are many good reasons to deploy IPv6, but we must recognise that IPv6 and IPv4 will coexist for many years to come and will continue to persist to support legacy infrastructure. To allow both IPv4 and IPv6 services to be offered to the JANET community, UKERNA will be deploying IPv4 / IPv6 dual stack (hyperlink "UKERNA will be deploying IPv4 / IPv6 dual stack " to table) on the JANET production routers. Alongside the native IPv6 service, UKERNA will continue to provide support through the JANET IPv6 Experimental Service, which will be available for interested JANET connected organisations who require IPv6 network connectivity from May 2002.

Further details about the JANET IPv6 Positioning Statement and the support provided through the JANET IPv6 Experimental Service can be found at:
http://www.ja.net/development/ipv6/posi ... ement.html

In summary:

1. IPv6 enabled products are available now.
2. Full-scale deployment of IPv6 is at least a few years away.
3. IPv4 and IPv6 will coexist for many years.
4. A JANET IPv6 Experimental Service was launched in May 2002 to primarily support research activity.
5. Some key points for JANET connected organisations and regional networks to bear in mind are: Taking into account IPv6 developments when considering future equipment purchases; track IPv6 developments; and bear in mind that to participate in the JANET IPv6 Experimental Service, where tunnelling is used, that no physical changes to existing infrastructure needs to be made.

IPv4

This is the current technology used by most people in the world, and it has been very successful, though due to the worlds increased use of the internet the technology has begun to show its limitations. The first of these is the number of addresses that it can support. IPv4 addresses are based on a 4 bytes (32bit). Each byte is also known as an Octets. These are normally seen with a decimal notation for ease of use. As each octet of 8 bits can only support 256 possible combinations, from 0 to 255, the biggest possible address in IPv4 is represented as this 255.255.255.255 with the smallest being 0.0.0.0, this represents a total of 4,294,967,296, which is roughly 4.3 billion, which may seem like overkill but the explosion of the internet and the number of network appliances which will require an ip, and the poor distrubution of Ips have meant that increases in the ip number is needed.

IPv6

With the increased need for IP addresses IPv6 was devised, this system uses 128bits, (16bytes) long addresses, which means that they can represent more than 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible addresses. Though due to the increased number of PDA's, mobile phones and general network connections, this number will be increasing eaten in too.

Another benefit of Ipv6 is the increased security and encryption used, as IPSec which is an encryption protocol is madatory in IPv6, whereas it was only optional in IPv4. Making IPSec madatory gives increased security at the client level with true end to end security with it being host to host, rather than network to network as it was in IPv4. Another advantage is that the use of Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) will become obsolete as IPv6 can permanently allocate an address, which helps to create an easy environment for people to access a system and reduces administration. Also with the removal of a DHCP server, it can mean that this server can be used on other tasks. During the time that IPv6 and IPv4 co-exsist there are already measures in place to allow IPv4 applications to work on IPv6 until they can be updated, so to create an easier transfer of technology.