Latest IPv6 Status Discussed at Asia Pacific IPv6 Summit

Asia Pacific IPv6 Summit was held on February 23 and 24 2005 in Kyoto, Japan. The conference was held as part of Asia Pacific Regional INTERNET Conference on Operational Technologies (APRICOT), with presentations on the present and future of IPv6 and Asia Pacific region.


Main Phase-2 certifications to start by April

The summit first discussed overall IPv6-related issues, such as IPv6 support by DNS servers and IPv6 standardization at IETF.

Hirofumi Hotta at Japan Registry Service (JPRS) reported that IPv6 support in .JP domain is making a substantial progress. AAAA record registration was enabled in March 2000, and 4 out of 6 .JP name servers support IPv6 transport. .JP NS host AAAA record was registered to Root zone.

IPv6 Ready Logo Program announced just before the conference that Phase-2 Program was formally started. According to Hiroshi Miyata, Project Leader of TAHI project, core protocol conformance spec and interoperability testing scenario are done; IPsec conformance spec is done and interoperability testing scenario is under public review; Mobile IPv6 conformance spec public review is done and interoperability testing scenario is preparing for public review; MLDv1 conformance spec work is done and interoperability testing scenario is being worked on. Transition technology is not included in the first round of Phase-2 Logo program, due to the difficulty in choosing the appropriate technology. As for the actual logo protocol start dates, core protocol certification is being offered in February, while IPsec and Mobile IPv6 will be started in March and April, respectively. Miyata warned that Phase-2 interop testing scenario takes far more hours than Phase-1.

On IPv6 standardization at IETF, Tomohiro Fujisaki reported that IPv6 WG is discussing simplified DAD for shorter process, especially for mobile environment. As for DNS server discovery, 3 proposals are currently being examined: DHCPv6, RA, and well-known address. Tunneling-based transition technology will be moved to a new working group. Multi6 Working Group, which has discussed multihoming for IPv6, agreed on separating address functions to ID and locator, offering Shim layer under Layer 3 for mapping between ID and locator. This will be discussed in a new working group.

About IPv6 address allocation, Toshiyuki Hosaka at Japan Network Information Center (JPNIC) explained that trend for larger initial allocations. APNIC Executive Council endorsed a new policy allowing allocation of larger address blocks to existing IPv6 address holders without meeting requirements for subsequent allocations but based on the evaluation of IPv4 services. Large allocations made till the end of January are 3 in APNIC region and 6 in RIPE NCC region. On IPv6 address allocation, JPNIC has worked so far as the coordinator of application to APNIC, one of the RIRs. But JPNIC will start accepting applications on its own in May 2005.


Japanese Communication Ministry started IPv6 deployment

Takuya Miyoshi at Japanese Ministry of Information and Communication (MIC) explained the government role in promoting IPv6. He said, with the success of e-Japan programs, the Japanese government will head toward u-Japan, a strategy to enable ubiquitous and transparent communications. IPv6 will be one of the core technology for this. MIC is sponsoring IPv6 Transition Field Trial, while MIC has started using IPv6 on its LAN. At present, experimental environment is built to enable IPv6 mobile access to MIC LAN for use of e-mail and discussion boards.

According to Reen-Cheng Wang, NICI IPv6 Steering Committee of Taiwan, Taiwan government will build IPv6 transition plan and develop native IPv6 infrastructure in 2005, followed by completion of national IPv6 infrastructure and promotion of IPv6-enabled 3G phones and wireless LAN devices. Taiwan is conducting Advanced Broadband Integrated e-service Network, an initiative to deploy 6 million-subscriber IPv6-enabled infrastructure by 2007. Government service network core will be IPv6-enabled in 2007. Most ISPs in Taiwan have IPv6 address already, and two ISPs have began trial services. Currently conducted field trials include IPv6-enabled on-Demand Video services and public IPv6 multimedia phones.

In Thailand, Thailand IPv6 Forum was formally established in February 2005. There are no commercial services available at present, and 4 IPv6 address allocations have been made so far. But on UniNet, Thai University Network connecting 200 institutions, 6 universities are connected with dual stacks, and 10 others are using IPv6 tunneling.

Asia Pacific IPv6 Summit
http://2005.apricot.net/conference.html