IPv6 Mandates: Choosing a Transition Strategy, Preparing Transition Plans, and Executing the Migration of a Network to IPv6

Chapter 3. The Current IPv6 Landscape

	Dark Helmet: When will then be now? Colonel Sandurz: Soon.
	--Mel Brooks' Spaceballs

When I started writing this book, I decided to leave this chapter for last so that I could present the most current information regarding IPv6 developments. For example, although I assumed that IPv6 adoption would proceed roughly linearly for the time being (and it has), I wanted to document the latest hard numbers. I also wanted to incorporate all the latest news, standards updates, and so on, so that the book would not be a historical reference before it was printed. IPv6 is moving and changing that quickly. It turns out that, other than IPv6 adoption proceeding about as quickly as expected (which is by no means a land rush), nothing much concrete has happened in the past five months. There has been some news, both positive in terms of IPv6 adoption and negative in terms of new security vulnerabilities. I'll summarize those in this chapter, and several of them are covered elsewhere in the book. I think the positives outweigh the negatives by a significant enough margin for you to feel encouraged about IPv6's destiny, unlike that of its predecessors (using the thirteenth-century meaning of that word, "those that died before it"), like GOSIP I would like to have seen more transition progress in the past five months; this chapter would not have been too outdated had I written it five months ago, but that's a very small measurement window for something that's ...