DOD Official Calls Federal IPv6 Effort ‘Sad Story’ of Bureaucratic ‘Mess’
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Federal agencies’ IPv6 adoption is “really a mess,” a Defense Department technologist centrally involved in the effort said Wednesday. “It’s a sad story across the federal government,” said Ron Broersma, a member of the Federal IPv6 Task Force and the network security manager for Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command. “But there’s a major push to fix that in the next year.”
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Carriers awarded GSA’s Networx contract “say they support IPv6,” but their customer federal agencies “are told, ‘Don’t ask for that -- we're not ready yet,” Broersma said at the Gogonet Live conference on implementation of the new Internet protocol. When pressed, the carriers say they're required to support the technology but when asked for it don’t want to promise what they can’t deliver, he said. The carriers say they're “trying to get that fixed,” Broersma said. And vendors aren’t themselves using IPv6 technologies that they're selling, he said. “We're having to discover all the bugs."
Agencies are under a September 2012 deadline to IP-enable public-facing services, Broersma said. “That has driven a lot of activity, though there hasn’t been much progress,” he said. Following “typical bureaucratic processes,” nearly all the effort has been devoted to massive planning, Broersma said. DOD, like many other agencies, has no v6 technology “operational,” he said. The direction of the work has been a “big mistake,” Broersma said. IPv6 needs to be activated “sooner rather than later” to work through the many problems, he said. “You will get it wrong in almost every case” on addressing plans without operational experience, Broersma said: “It took me three times to get it right.” Various solutions require vendors to come up with new features and that can easily take 18 months, he said.
The website of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, centrally involved in promoting adoption of the protocol, “failed on IPv6 Day,” a major embarrassment among the three largest problems in the worldwide test in June, Broersma said. The failure resulted from lack of planning, and the IPv6 boosters in the agency said it happened because others were in charge of crucial functions, he said. Many other federal agencies “cheated” and had Akamai do the experiment for them, Broersma said. That meant a “missed opportunity,” he said. Throughout the government, “it’s not a very good story,” he said.
Many reasons are offered, Broersma said: There’s no incentive for IPv6 adoption, resources are stretched, “there’s another priority” such as security, there’s “no business case, no new thing I can do” to sell the change to the chief information officer. “It’s not a business-case issue,” he said. “It’s a matter of sustainability,” the survival of the Internet and of the government’s work online.
"We expect 2012 to be a big year finally for IPv6,” said AT&T Fellow Chris Chase. ISPs will adopt the protocol next year and “we're going to see traffic volumes going up,” he said. AT&T will enable IPv6 on U-verse in 2012, Chase said. Most customer equipment on the carrier’s legacy broadband service isn’t v6-enabled, but starting shortly new equipment shipping will be, he said.
There’s discussion of an IPv6 Week in June 2012, in which “all the content providers” will try the protocol and “by the end of it they may leave it on permanently,” said Yves Poppe, Tata Communications’ director of IP services. He and Broersma said there’s also discussion of going IPv6 only in January 2013, for the 30th anniversary of activation of IPv4.