An excellent summary of major announcments about IPv6 this year: The Year IPv6 Made it to Major League
May 6th 2007: ARIN board of trustees passes a resolution advising the Internet community that migration to a new version of the internet protocol, IPv6, will be necessary to allow continued growth of the internet.June 29th 2007, Puerto Rico: ICANN Board resolution states that: The Board further resolves to work with the Regional Internet Registries and other stakeholders to promote education and outreach, with the goal of supporting the future growth of the Internet by encouraging the timely deployment of IPv6.
Oct 26th 2007 at the RIPE 55 meeting in Amsterdam: “Growth and innovation on the Internet depends on the continued availability of IP address space. The remaining pool of unallocated IPv4 address space is likely to be fully allocated within two to four years...the deployment of IPv6 is necessary for the development of future IP networks”
Nov 15th 2007: IGF meeting, Rio de Janeiro, chairman’s report: “Panelists also discussed the eventual exhaustion of ICANN’s reserve of unassigned IPv4 addresses.”
It was made clear that this would not cause the Internet to fail, but this was used to indicate the importance of the effort to bring the IPv6 network on-line and the need for the full interoperability between the IPv4 and IPv6 networks.
This is but a small sample of the fast growing visibility IPv6 acquired this year, 2007.
The internet ecosystem, ranging from network Operator Groups (NOG) to peering forums to Regional Internet Registries (RIR) to ICANN, to IANA and even the United Nations sponsored Internet Governance Forum (IGF), had IPv6 quite high on its agenda this year. This rather sudden surge has taken at least some of us, amongst long term IPv6 proponents and advocates, by surprise, as it took close to a decade, lots of persistence, lots of convincing and periods of doubt, to get to this point. This is a period those involved in the early IPv6 experiments and deployment in the Research and Education Networks, the IPv6 Forum since its beginnings back in 1999, should savor and enjoy. Not to mention those who fathered RFC’s, spent time at IETF and late nights on numerous mailing lists and never ending e-mail strings.