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internet ipv6

The end of #IPv4 and the coming of #IPv6 – exclusive interview with The Young Journalist Academy

Over the past few days I have had a flurry of media interviews on the subject of the exhaustion of the IANA IPv4 address pool and the advent of IPv6. This is increasingly going to be a talking point during 2011. The biggest problem in linking to these interviews is that they are usually on the BBC and typically only accessible via iPlayer, and then only for a week after the event.

It would be nice to be able to link to something that should stay up for a more usable period of time. On this occasion I was pleased to spend some of Saturday morning (pre golf 🙂 ) talking to some budding young journalists in my hometown of Lincoln. They (Jonathan and Robert from Year 8, Carre’s Grammar School, Sleaford) have written a story and posted it on “The Young Journalist Academy” website.

The podcast is here.

Trefor Davies

By Trefor Davies

Liver of life, father of four, CTO of trefor.net, writer, poet, philosopherontap.com

3 replies on “The end of #IPv4 and the coming of #IPv6 – exclusive interview with The Young Journalist Academy”

That’s still one of the biggest problems with iPlayer, when it comes to news reports they usually don’t give you a way to embed the video or share it around on websites. I can perfectly see why they don’t do this for other things but TV news is usually public access style content and I don’t see why they shouldn’t adopt a more YouTube style of approach to friendly sharing for it.

OH right.. the topic was about IPv4 exhaustion 🙂 . Well that one is simple enough, IPv4 isn’t and won’t die out for decades but any ISP not prepared for its replacement, IPv6, will have problems growing their customer base. Connectivity issues could also stem from old IPv4-only supporting hardware and there’s also the possibility of performance, legal and security woes from ISPs that try to delay the inevitable by sharing old IP’s between several users.

Hi Tref.
You could also always capture your BBC interviews and put them on your website and/or http://audioboo.fm/tref or if they are video put them on YouTube. The only issue I can see is if the BBC are ‘funny’ with the copyright.

(As you know! *stalker*) I’ve been listening to your recent BBC broadcasts and have found that some of the messages are getting a bit mixed. No doubt it’s all clear in your mind but for us laymen things could be clearer 🙂

Sometimes the message is it’s all down to your ISP being prepared, so most people will relax and expect their ISP to be on the case. But sometimes home routers are mentioned as possibly needing to be replaced. I think it’s worth clearing this up.

Here’s a brain dump of some of my thoughts/questions:

When will I need an IPv6 router?
There only seem to be a handful of routers that support IPv6 at the moment.
Many users don’t have routers supplied by their ISP so what should they be doing?
If I was buying a new router should I ONLY buy an IPv6 capable one?
Lots of older routers won’t have firmware updates etc. made available – will they eventually be in the same situation as they are with Digital TV? i.e. Buy new kit or eventually have no service?
If a high percentage of people on broadband will need new routers eventually that sounds like an awful lot of new routers to be bought and a lot of land fill being generated!
I’m on a longish line and have found that I need to use a Broadcom chipset based router to get the most out of my situation (it’s transformed my line). So for me not all replacement routers will be suitable.
How about computer Operating Systems. Will they all need to be running TCP/IP v6? Will changes mean that home and office networks will need to be re-configured?

Sorry that’s all rather messy!

Some more information on World IPv6 Day (8th June 2011) would be worth doing.
Explaining what it’s testing and how it effects users and ISPs.

This is hopefully a worthwhile link: http://test-ipv6.com/ An IPv6 Test site provided by the Internet Society. For me it showed that “no problems are anticipated” for the World IPv6 Day but that my provider has some work to do on updating their ‘resolvers’. After contacting I’ve found this is in hand…

Hopefully it will work out just just like Y2K!
🙂

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