NTT America demonstrated an IPv6-based Earthquake Early Warning S...
NTT America demonstrated an IPv6-based Earthquake Early Warning System at Wednesday’s State of the Net Conference. The system, built for Japan, alerts people about tremors 10- 20 seconds before they strike. Twenty seconds doesn’t sound like much but studies…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
show it makes a difference, said NTTA Vice President Kazuhiro Gomi in an interview. “If you are in the kitchen, you can shut down all the fires, and if you're in a dangerous zone you can quickly get away from that place and hide yourself from anything hazardous.” The technology works because data moves over fiber faster than an earthquake’s waves course through the ground, he said. In Japan, NTT detects quakes with Japan Meteorological Agency sensors and then sends IPv6 devices messages detailing the scale and timing of a tremor. The alert system can be used for disasters other than earthquakes, provided there are sensors to detect them, said Chris Davis, NTTA product marketing director. Such a wide scale alert system wouldn’t be practical in IPv4, Gomi said. IPv4 has multicast capabilities, but they were added on later and most ISPs haven’t turned them on, he said. “Even though you [can] send out the multicast packets on IP version 4, the chances are the packets are dropped all over the place.” Another problem is the network address translator (NAT) IPv4 requires to sustain the growing number of Internet capable devices, he said. “NAT is a good solution as long as you're just doing e-mailing or Web surfing,” he said, but it doesn’t let a central server reach out directly to an end point device, he said. NTTA is present at State of the Net to show IPv6 to government agencies that must implement the network protocol to satisfy a 2005 mandate requiring government agencies to implement the next-generation network protocol by June. NTT America sells a dual-stack IPv6 network that supports IPv4, Davis said. Offering backward compatibility is important, he said: “In the short term, I don’t think we see the U.S. government switching their networks to IP version 6 and all the sudden running up a whole different protocol,” Davis said. “There will be revenue from IPv6 transit,” but the government will keep legacy systems and applications that need the old version, he said.