IPv6 Must Be Enabled On All US Government Sites By Sunday 179
darthcamaro writes "Agencies of the U.S. Federal Government are racing to comply with a September 30th deadline to offer web, email and DNS for all public facing websites over IPv6. While not all government websites will hit the deadline, according to Akamai at least 2,000 of them will. According to at least one expert, the IPv6 mandate is proof that top-down cheerleading for tech innovation works. 'The 2012 IPv6 mandate is not the first (or the last) IPv6 transition mandate from the U.S. government. Four years ago, in 2008, the U.S. government also had an IPv6 mandate in place. That particular mandate, required U.S. Government agencies to have IPv6-ready equipment enabled in their infrastructure.'"
Re:I blame the ISPs (Score:5, Insightful)
Good point, lets wait for the ISP's to run out of IPv4 addresses and suddenly start mandating that people's homes be IPv6 ready out of the blue. We basically have 3 choices.
1) Wait until residents do need it and suddenly give them IPv6 only because there are no IPv4 addresses left. Phone support will have hour-long waiting periods, computer shops will be overloaded with "I need this upgrade tonight so I can submit my college thesus" support requests and a large percentage of Internet users will be SOL until they get their turn in the support line. There's also a VERY good chance we will simply run out of routers, as an alarminly large percentage of consumer (and some professional) routers STILL don't support it and all those people will need upgrades.
2) Wait until we need it and start NAT'ing everyone's internet connection. This may not affect facebook users, but will be a royal PITA for anyone using remote connections, peer2peer networking, etc. If this happens we may not see IPv6 for another 15 years at LEAST.
3) Roll it out NOW in dual-stack configuration world-wide so everyone can get their computers, routers and other devices working with IPv6. ISP's can send out regular (every 2-4 months) letters to consumers still using IPv4 only to warn them about the upcoming switch and give them enough warning to switch over (like they did with digital tv broadcasting). When we finally do run out of IPv4 addresses at the ISP level (and this is ALREADY happening in some areas such as mobile, etc), the ISP's can just disable IPv4 for new customers and/or those already fully using IPv4 and experience a truly smooth transition.
If the analog-2-digial transition for TV broadcasting has taught us anything, it's that consumers need a LONG time to transition between technologies. Considering the TV transition required nothing more than plugging in 1 box with 3 wires on it and IPv6 is going to require computer/OS and router replacement in many cases, we need to start the IPv6 transition on all ISP's about 2 years ago.
Re:Nice to see (Score:2, Insightful)
It's kind of pointless though if they aren't mandating ISP's to at least provide dual-stack support for both protocols. What's the point of government websites being IPv6 if the country is still stuck on IPv4?
To enable a smooth transition. By making sure that all government websites are IPv6 compatible it will be safe for consumers to make the transition without having to worry that they will be locked out from vital services.
The problem is that unless there are IPv6 only hosts there is no point for consumers to make the transition and without a lot of IPv6 only consumers it makes no sense for hosts to invest in IPv6 servers.
This is pretty much the government taking a step to move society out of a hen-egg deadlock.