When I was asked to write this blog, I did not expect the month of October to be so packed with different events that would easily lend themselves to blogging.
The first one was IP Expo in London ExCeL. I had never visited this trade show before and I was looking forward to an inspirational opening keynote by Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
Sir Berners-Lee is immortalized because his work, a memo published in 1989, laid foundation to HyperText Markup Language. HTML is the language that was first used to build web pages and forms the basis of the Web that we know today. While waiting for his speech to start, I reflected that it was the World Wide Web (WWW) I had encountered in school that eventually had led to my career of a network engineer. I was intrigued how information anywhere in the world could be accessed from any place with basic connectivity. I was hooked and wanted to understand more about the underlying technology.
As expressed in his keynote, these days Sir Berners-Lee is more concerned about net neutrality, maintaining the self-governing and distributed nature of the Internet envisaged 25 years ago. As you may have seen in the press recently there are countries where government would like to have a more controlling influence on how the Internet works.
The future of the Internet as Sir Berners-Lee sees it, lies in big data, in connecting not just people but also things. Something, we in Cisco call the Internet of Everything. It is the next step, which is already happening in the developed countries.
Back to the basics of the Internet. The work of Sir Berners-Lee had an unprecedented impact on the world and it could have not happened without a pulse that the networks need to carry pictures of cute puppies, videos of silly cats and all the amazing things that people share on the Internet.
That pulse is called Internet Protocol, IP. At the core of IP is the IP address. This is a number, given to every device that connects to a network and allows communication with other devices on that network and on the Internet.
Currently we are using the first generation, IP version 4, which was brought to life in 1981. In 1981, eight years before Sir Berners-Lee’s memo, 4.5 billion IPv4 addresses looked like a good size of addressing space, the creators had after all expected no more than a few thousand devices to be connected. Then the World Wide Web came.
25 years forward when we think of the future of the Internet, all the things connecting to it, one must wonder: are there enough IP addresses? When Cisco estimates 1.5 trillion things can connect to the Internet in the (not so distant) future, how are we going to ensure that everyone and everything has an IP address to communicate on the Internet?
In reality with IPv4 there are not enough addresses for each device to have it’s own identity. Several preservation techniques have been introduced over the years to stretch the boundaries but each one introduces its own complexities, tradeoffs and inevitably cost.
The industry consensus for many years has been the current version of IP will not scale, no matter what preservation techniques are put in place. Since 1995 the inevitable successor to IPv4, IPv6 has been developed. Portions of the Internet have supported IPv6 for many years but its enablement relies on devices and infrastructure to be ‘turned on’ and only recently have we seen this occurring en-masse. Since 2012 the volume of Global IPv6 has doubled each year – from 0.5% in June 2012 to 4.7% in October 2014 (check 6lab.cisco.com).
The biggest benefit of IPv6 is the enormous addressing space, in human language that means massive number of IP addresses which equals a massive number of objects and people connecting to the Internet. IPv6 will bring the Internet of Things truly to life.
This brings me to the second significant event that took place in October in the UK, The first public UK IPv6 Council meeting. The UK is currently in a dormant state when it comes to IPv6 deployment – only 0.29% of user traffic to Google uses IPv6. However, as it was announced during the Council meeting, things are looking up and 2015 will be the year of change.
Major UK Service Providers, BT, BSkyB and Virgin Media, for the first time spoke publically about their IPv6 plans. BSkyB was the most bullish announcing that IPv6 customer trials would start in early 2015. Which is great news!
I am sure that the other players will not remain behind; the UK Service Provider market is highly competitive.
This will no doubt make Sir Berners-Lee happy because the Internet will remain available for everyone and everything now and in the future thanks to having plenty of IP addresses. The ongoing battle will be to keep the Internet neutral without any central authority trying to take it over!
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