Lab Network Will Enable Trials of IPv6 Devices and Services
The Internet Protocol version 6 Forum began a worldwide testbed for IPv6 products. “Boundv6” was named for the late Jim Bound, developer of Moonv6, a global, permanently deployed, multi-vendor IPv6 network led by the North American IPv6 Task Force and the University of New Hampshire-InterOperability Lab, the forum said Wednesday. Where Moonv6 was about vendor interoperability, the new program aims to create a permanent network initially connecting IPv6-ready, logo- and U.S. government-approved labs where IPv6 users can trial applications and devices “in meaningful test scenarios,” it said.
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!
Boundv6 is targeted at government and critical networks, businesses, ISPs and app developers, the forum said. The key challenge will be encouraging all IPv6 test cases to have built-in security, it said.
Boundv6 is supported by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the U.S. Government Defense Research and Engineering Network (DREN), the forum said. It will be important to the USGv6 product-testing program to help agencies meet their IPv6 deployment mandates, said Doug Montgomery, NIST manager for Internet and scalable systems research and USGv6 project lead. “IPv6 is ready for prime time, but some business models and applications are not ready for IPv6,” said DREN Chief Engineer Ron Broersma. Boundv6 is a great opportunity to validate and test the next phase of IPv6 implementation, he said.
Having support from the U.S. and NIST “just shows how critical” the program is, IPv6 Forum President Latif Ladid told us. The U.S. is “still the biggest driver of infrastructure and its leadership is highly followed by the rest of the world,” he said. Boundv6 has also won backing from IPv6 organizations in China, Taiwan, Slovenia and the Philippines, the forum said.
Asked whether Boundv6 will appeal to ISPs that have historically shunned IPv6, Ladid said “ramp-up” to the next-generation technology by service providers has boomed since February. More than 9,000 networks have requested IPv6 out of about 20,000 domain name registry members, and that figure is rising daily, he said. The U.S. is “by far the largest, hence its strategic relevance,” he said. Some 171 countries now have IPv6 prefixes, allocated by regional Internet registries, that are visible to ISPs, he said.
Companies that have so far failed to prepare for IPv6 now need major, “forklift upgrades,” and should be interested in using Boundv6 to bring their services up to date, Ladid said. Any organization can join Boundv6 “if they add real value or maybe just want to learn how to do it,” he said.