In the final analysis, to enable IPv6 is only a configuration change to the existing networking infrastructure!
Notwithstanding the seemly lengthy and complicated format of IPv6 address, which is represented as eight groups of four hexadecimal digits, each group representing 16 bits (such as 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334), whereas the IPv4 address uses a dotted-decimal format, where each byte ranges from 0 to 255 (such as 10.1.1.1), to configure and enable IPv6 in the networking infrastructure is NOT that complicated.
From the network engineers’ perspective, to deploy IPv6 is no more complicated than to introduce a new OSPF routing instance or to establish a new BGP session in your current production network environment. At the end of the day, to enable a separate IPv6 stack in parallel with the existing IPv4 stack in a so-called dual stack configuration in the current networking infrastructure is simply a configuration change by adding only a few command lines to the network devices and hosts (such as routers, L3 switches, firewalls, servers, etc.), similar to what you would normally do to enable a new OSPF routing protocol or to establish a BGP session with your peers for the network devices, provided that the current network devices and systems in your organization are fairly up to date. If that is not the case, then your network infrastructure will potentially have more than just a problem to support the IPv6 in a dual-stack mode of operation with IPv4 and IPv6.
Consequently, it is very misleading and disingenuous for someone engaged in the practice of adopting the IPv6 to constantly keep mixing up a simple technical matter with complicated and unnecessary political debates and even geopolitical politics in both the global forum and some of the relevant international conferences.
As Vint Cerf, one of "the fathers of the Internet" and the co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocol, once said, the IPv4 that we are using today is only “the experimental version of the Internet” and it was somehow leaked out to the rest of the world from his original experiment. He called the IPv6 as “the production version of the Internet” for the 21st century.
If that is the case, why does anyone still want to keep running a beta version of software in the production environment?! Why can’t we just perform a simple configuration change in our current networking infrastructure to upgrade the beta version of the IP code to the real production version of the Internet so that we will be able to continue to support the future growth and development of the new Internet?!!
Disclaimer: The views presented are only personal opinions and they do not necessarily represent those of the U.S. Government
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