TRANSITION TO IPV6 IN WIRELINE ENVIRONMENTS

Early in 2011 the last unassigned public IPv4 address blocks were divided among the regional Internet addressing authorities. Service providers will see the impact of this in 2012 and must take measures to sustain subscriber and network service growth. However, as the Internet is currently almost exclusively based on IPv4, the introduction of IPv6 alone does not solve the IPv4 address exhaustion problem in the short term. Subscribers will still need an IPv4 address to access the vast majority of Internet servers that are still using IPv4. This article examines the best options for introducing IPv6 in existing wireline environments, how to support legacy devices, applications and services that only support IPv4, and the implications associated with the options available.