What's up with IPv6 ?

I'm in Dearborn Michigan this week for the NANOG and ARIN meetings. NANOG = North American Network Operators Group. NANOG is very much like the Internet2 Joint Techs Workshops for the commercial sector. It's where network engineers get together to discuss cool new things they're doing. And, like most of these things, it's a lot about social networking - a chance to meet face-to-face with the people you email and IM with every day. ARIN = American Registry of Internet Numbers. ARIN is the non-profit that is responsible for handing out Internet number resources - primarily IP addresses.

IPv6 is a huge topic of discussion this week. Yahoo presented on their IPv6 roll-out which they completed last week. Comcast just presented on their deployment. Google has IPv6 deployed as well. I saw a news story last week that the number of ISPs requesting IPv6 addresses from ARIN has gone way up. In fact, in the last quarter (last month maybe) ARIN received more requests for IPv6 addresses than IPv4 addresses for the first time ever. It seems that IPv6 is *finally* getting some traction. My sense is that this is the real deal and IPv6 is really going to happen now.

It's funny though to see all the hype around IPv6 in the commercial sector. We rolled out IPv6 on the Internet2 network in 2000 and had IPv6 enabled on every data jack at IU around 2001. WRT IPv6, attending a NANOG in 2009 is much like attending an Internet2 Joint Techs Workshop in 2000 or 2001.