Global IPv6 Summit in China 2004 Keynote 4 zmew Economic Expansion ­¡New Lifestyles on the New Net

Latif Ladid, chairman, IPv6 Forum

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Latif Ladid, chairman, IPv6 Forum

Latif Ladid, chairman of IPv6 Forum, a worldwide IPv6 promotion organization, discussed the changing Internet and the role of IPv6. Summary of his speech follows:

Internet is at the crossroads. We are beginning to see everal new Internet services, such as Wi-Fi. New countries with huge polulation are beginning to use the Internet. Human wisdom is in solving big problems with small fixes. IPv6 is such small fix.

As for address consumption, everyone knows about recent prediction by Geoff Huston. But he acknowledged that we would have been beyond IPv4 address space if no NATs, gateways, DHCP servers had been available. Telekom Austria announced IPv6 service, saying, “IPv6 is indispensable in reducing cost and complexity”, and its stock price shot up. NAT is about control, but IPv6 is about freedom.

At CES this year, vendors talked about similar new computing concepts, such as ubiquitous computing and organic computing, which may be summarized as “Futile Computing”.

Already we see many applications for peer-to-peer communication, such as ICQ,, JXTA, KazaA, Jabber, GGF, skype, and SETI@Home. Current P2P applications are flexible and easy to use, but they can’t be called full peer-to-peer applications as they typically involves using NATs. In contrast, GRID computing enables highly decentralized computing environment, and IPv6 can give it a considerable help. GRID computing can integrate advantages of current P2P applications to become an innovative computing platform, which is well supported by IPv6.

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