IPv6 Style
“IPv6 Summit in TOYAMA 2006” hosted by the IPv6 Deployment Committee, IA Japan, was held on March 3, 2006 in Toyama City, Toyama Prefecture. In addition to the keynote speech by Prof. Hiroshi Esaki from the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, University of Tokyo, unlike at past IPv6 related events, there were seminars given by various members, including Mr. Masahiro Yoshiszaki, Chief of the General Affairs Department at NICT, an independent administrative agency, and Mr. Kazuo Imai, Network Laboratories, NTT Docomo.
Keynote speech “The fourth wave of the Internet – From getting money to saving money” by Prof. Hiroshi Esaki, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, University of Tokyo
Prof. Hiroshi Esaki, Department of Information and Communication Engineering, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, University of Tokyo, gave the keynote speech titled “The fourth wave of the Internet – From getting money to saving money”. He emphasized that the benefit of making things IPv6-enabled is actually in cost reduction, while showing some examples. I will summarize his talk below.
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Within IPv4 environments, NAT and networks with private addresses are often used due to their low initial cost. However, once people have to deal with merging/removing networks due to an office move or with upgrading networking equipment, the cost, including time and money, increases. If the network is implemented using global IP addresses, such conflicts do not occur; furthermore, if IPv6 is used, client reconfiguration can be minimized.
Another reason many companies have been using NAT is that, due to the recession, they continue to have difficulties thinking in the long term about their systems, and they want to keep their initial costs down. However, it has become, in the end, penny wise and pound foolish.
A good example that illustrates this is FreeBit’s adoption of IP telephone. FreeBit IP-enabled their office telephone systems, which connect more than 200 locations nationwide, within 9 months. If they had used IPv4, they would have had to manually configure 8 separate things per IP phone unit, and moreover, they would have had to do it one by one. However, they used IPv6 this time, so they didn’t have to deal with such minute configuration. Up until now, although the engineers’ labor costs were expensive, we had to ask them to spend many hours and days just to configure IP telephones. Compared to that, the difference in cost between using IPv4 and IPv6 is very obvious.
In Japan, the most expensive costs are labor costs, and it is important to maintain the company’s competitiveness while reducing labor costs. Private addresses, at first glance, seem to be a low cost solution; however, when you consider running costs and costs throughout their life span, the high labor costs involved make them expensive. Those costs can be kept down by assigning global IP addresses from the start.
However, global IPv4 addresses are currently facing depletion. According to research released in 2005, only 25% of addresses currently remain; moreover, demand for addresses keeps growing. They say that all the addresses are expected to run out in 2008 at the earliest, in 2012 at the latest.
Prof. Esaki is participating in a private meeting that gathers IPv6 experts from around the world, called the IPv6 World Congress. He says that this is a meeting where they can discuss how IPv6 can be deployed around the world. The subject of the last meeting was how IT’s ROI could be improved by IPv6.
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Up until now, Japan has been taking the lead on IPv6. However, the US government decided to switch their network to IPv6 in 2008, and started taking various actions. In the past few years, Prof. Esaki has been having periodic meetings in the US with people from the Department of Defense (DOD). In the latter half of 2005, the people from the DOD attending the meetings changed from people in business suites to people wearing uniforms, meaning that they moved from the planning phase onto the implementation phase, and that they are working on it seriously.
As for why the DOD is adopting IPv6, their ultimate goal is trying to cut costs. Yuriko Koike, Minister of the Environment, gave a talk titled “The environment and IT” at the GLOBAL IP BUSINESS EXCHANGE 2006 held in February. Environmental issues will also become a favorable wind for IPv6.
Energy conservation has become an issue in various situations; environmental measures have become an element not for reducing costs but for improving efficiency. There is also an example where adoption of an IPv6-enabled facility control reduced the power consumption for air conditioning by as much as 40%.
When you think about things from the perspective of reducing these sorts of costs, you eventually reach the idea of making the entire town IT-based. If making things IT-based gives people peace of mind and the entire town becomes safe because of that, people’s activities becomes more efficient. If such an up-front investment on infrastructure is made, the town becomes like no other.
In many Asian countries, their infrastructure is not in place, so their working efficiency is not good. Making things IT-based increases our working efficiency more than we can imagine. And, IPv6 will improve it even further.
Seminar “Government and IPv6” by Mr. Masahiro Yoshizaki, Chief of General Affairs Department, NICT
Mr. Masahiro Yoshizaki, former Director of the General Policy Division, Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) and current Chief of the General Affairs Department, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, gave a seminar titled “Government and IPv6”. He summarized the role that the government has been playing in order to propagate IPv6.
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First he explained his connection to IPv6, saying that his role at the MIC was that of a budget mediator who needed to think about “how much money should be spent on the v6 project” and stressed that in that sense, he is “a novice on IPv6”. However, he started off explaining how he was looking at IPv6 as a novice. I will summarize the outline of his seminar below.
Frankly speaking, there are very few roles that the government can play in establishing IPv6 because it is the private sector that uses IPv6 the most. However, although small, there are about three things that the government can do.
The first thing is to support the development of a technology base that can be shared among people and the creation of rules such as standards. The second is, to run showroom-like projects when IPv6 is getting off the ground so that citizens can see and experience it, and make those projects a trigger for propagation. The third is for government itself to become users of IPv6, even if it may be only a small portion of the entire government.
Then, Mr. Yoshizaki talked about the characteristics of IPv6 and how they concern the government, from the perspective of those three viewpoints mentioned above. First, the number of addresses will be greatly increased. What is good about having many addresses? Last year, he was told that they needed budget money for research on sensor networks. The person explained to him that in case of earthquakes and such, it would let them conduct investigations for disaster recovery by scattering sensors from helicopters, and that if they use IPv6, they can do it without worrying about the number of addresses.
Next is end-to-end communication. To explain how it relates to government, it will affect the government when they have to reconsider the system they are using. Every year, it costs several hundred billion yen to replace their systems nationwide, and there are many legacy systems that are not even IP-enabled. Also, when using NAT and private addresses within IPv4 environments, there will be problems such as having to reassign addresses when the network is reconfigured. There have been restructurings within the government recently and we don’t know when there will be another one, but if IPv6 is used, the integration can be done easily. Actually, at the MIC, networks from three old ministries are mixed together.
Another aspect is multicast. In Japan, broadband is quite pervasive and it has come to the point that it is the cheapest and fastest in the world. A lot of video content is transmitted as well. However, since it is by unicast, the load on the network backbone is becoming a problem. This problem can be resolved by multicast.
Terrestrial digital broadcasting has launched and has begun spreading; it started in Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka in 2003, and it will start in other areas in 2006. For example, Toyama started working on terrestrial digital broadcasting early. There are 15,000 TV towers in Japan. They will keep working on until summer 2011, when analog broadcasts will be canceled. They are trying to finish this enormous task within several years, when it took 50 years last time. Frankly, they themselves don’t know how far they can get.
So, they want to distribute broadcasts in every possible way; in other words, they want to have a variety of options. One of these options is transmission by IP. However, when High-Definition content is sent via IP, guaranteeing the picture quality alone is a lot of work. Also, when a lot of information is transmitted, unicast creates a lot of waste, but multicast handles it well. These issues may be resolved if IPv6 multicast is used.
Implementing real time communications. It is essential for communication systems to continuously stream video content. Mr. Yoshizaki has high hopes for this field. v4 sends information without distinguishing data, audio or video content. When there is congestion, the transmission of video content sometimes gets interrupted. IPv6, though, prioritizes information and can send video content without interruption. When people think of IPv6, they tend to think of it in terms of communications. However, when you think about the fact that broadcasts and TV programs need to be transmitted digitally by 2011 as part of the integration of communications and broadcasting, expectations for IPv6 are high. So these are the things that Mr. Yoshizaki expects from the government.
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Then, what has the government been doing to propagate IPv6? e-Japan Strategy aims to make Japan the world-wide leader in IT within 5 years. e-Japan Strategy II began in the summer of 2003 and it aimed to make the entire economic system in Japan IT-based.
As part of that, IPv6 in e-government is important. In the US as well, they suddenly changed their policy and decided to adopt IPv6 by 2008. Up until now, Germany and Japan stood out in terms of number of IPv6 addresses allocated; however, the number of allocations is increasing in the US as well and it seems that the US is becoming more serious about it.
The benefits of using IPv6 in the US are mostly the same as ones in Japan. However, since the US has the presidential government system, they can take actions very quickly. On the other hand, in Japan’s case, it is very hard for things to move forward. Their efforts towards IPv6 started early, but there is a possibility that Japan can be overtaken in this field if it lowers its guard. We can see the Japanese government’s carefulness, to put it in a good way, or slowness, to put it in a bad way, in the IPv6 field as well. In reality, efforts towards IPv6 are very different depending on the agency. Also, even within the MIC, there seems to be very different degrees of interest between the section that promotes communication, which used to be the former Ministry of Post and Telecommunications, and the administrative management section where they manage e-government. The demand for IPv6 throughout Kasumigaseki is still not strong yet. Mr. Yoshizaki hopes that people would support IPv6 so that such demand will swell up strongly all around Japan.
He believes that it is important to let IPv6 seep in, even if little by little, in order to propagate it. Both IPv4 and IPv6 are Internet protocols and they are not something limited to Japan. So international collaboration is important. For example, meetings have been held periodically by ministers of information and communications from Japan, China and Korea. However, although China, Korea and Japan agree that IPv6 is important, their expectations are different. Up until now, when talking about the Internet, it was always focused on the US. It will be important for Asia to be the center of IPv6 from now on; it will be important for Japan to try to be the leader in the IPv6 field, especially when thinking about the future of Japanese industries.
Lastly, he talked about the things that the MIC has been doing and what could be improved. Frankly speaking, he thinks that IPv6 didn’t move forward as expected. It was because both hardware and software were not ready although the IPv6 technology itself is very good. In terms of that, he thinks it may take off exponentially around this year.
Another thing that the MIC has been doing that he thinks could be improved is the IPv6 Deployment Field Trials [literally “IPv6 Transition Field Trials” in Japanese]. It is a little too late, but he thinks naming it “transition” [in Japanese] may have been a mistake, since it was something totally different from transition. Also, as for addresses, he thinks that they talked a lot about the amount; they should have talked more about quality.
When he speaks of quality, he means that the nature of communication will change. Communication lets two people share their thoughts by using words. From now on, it will be different. It will get to the point where communication can be conducted among things. This is the ubiquitous network.