Internet Week 2005 was held at Pacifico Yokohama from December 6th through the 9th. On the second day, which was designated “IPv6 Day”, they held a conference focused on IPv6, “IPv6 Technical Summit 2005”.
At the opening of the Summit, Hiroshi Fujiwara, President and CEO of Internet Research Institute, Inc., and Toshiya Asaha, Executive Vice President of Internet Initiative Japan, Inc., gave keynote speeches.
Mr. Fujiwara, whose theme was “IP changes the media business paradigm,” spoke about the development of Internet technology and how it would change the content business.
According to Mr. Fujiwara, events currently happening in the broadcasting and Internet industries can be summarized by the following five points: the Internet used by computers is changing due to the appearance of ubiquitous computing and digital appliances; broadband is spreading among people regardless of sex or age; telecommunication companies do a triple-play, handling not only telephone and data communication infrastructure, but also content business; the primary player in mobile infrastructure is switching from cell phones to wireless broadband; and broadcasting is becoming IP-based.
In addition to these five events, he concluded that, considering the expectation that the content business will grow from the current 10 trillion yen to 15 trillion yen by 2010, the next five years will see the arrival of new business opportunities on the Internet.
Following Mr. Fujiwara, Mr. Asaha gave a speech titled “Challenges for the Internet” and spoke about the issues that the current Internet is facing.
At the beginning of his speech, Mr. Asaha showed the number of years that it took for the various communication technologies to reach a 10% penetration rate in households. According to these numbers, the Internet took only 5 years, in comparison to the telephone, which took 76 years. Even a dog year takes longer than this.
However, he claims that the Internet spread rapidly primarily because the telephone circuits had already been spread nationwide, although it was also affected by computer propagation, due to dropping computer prices, and efforts by ISP companies.
Mr. Asaha referred to the “freeloader period” where the Internet was propagated using pre-existing infrastructure as Phase 1, the “becoming independent period”, which is the period from now on, as Phase 2, and stated that the Internet is currently transitioning from Phase 1 to Phase 2.
He also says that Phase 1 is based on legacy technologies, including telephones; in order for the Internet to become independent, we cannot keep using the technologies that we are currently using. IPv6 has to become the technology that is used to undertake Phase 2, however, there may still be something missing.
He concluded by saying that in order to complete this transition quickly as well, if there is something missing in IPv6, we need to fill that in, and in order to do so, it is important to understand the technological points in the changes that are currently happening.
