What are the top challenges that still need to be addressed in order to get IPv6-ready?
FB: We just did a survey in the IETF of ISPs and other people who are running such networks. The comments we got back was that those who believed that there was an issue with v4 were moving to v6, and that there were ISPs that believed that we would never run out of IPv4 address and had absolutely no plan for it. And that remains true right now. Those who want to bet that way, I think they're silly. But it's their bet. Somebody has to go out and do some education and convince people.
TC: One issue for us is that a lot of people within my company think that the NAT gateway will be able to prolong and extend v4 so that we don't have to really deploy v6 on every front right away. The problem right now is that NAT doesn't work 100%. We know for a fact, when we deploy, 10% of our customers are using applications that NAT cannot support or will not support. We get complaints from the call center asking us to fix some of these problems already and we can't. So I've been telling them that NAT is not the way to go, but there are still people within my company that think deploying NAT will work.
MAR: The issue for us is the timing: When do we really start seeing and thinking about it then getting it deployed? When do we really see the implementation happening?
CL: Internally, my biggest concern is probably the OSS/BSS systems, just like it is for any network project that has nothing to do with whether it's v4, v6, a new platform - it's always the OSS/BSS that catches you out. The other big one is the lack of a good solution for the legacy v4 nodes on the client side of the network. I'm not so much worried about v6- and v4-only content. My concern is the v4 nodes in someone's home: the media player, etc - the consumer electronics devices that are not going to get replaced for years. The fact that the industry is just now starting to address this is a problem.