The IPv6 is an upgrade from Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4), which computer networks on most college campuses, homes and businesses use. The upgraded system allows 80,000 trillion times more Internet addresses than IPv4. The upgraded network protocol, in addition to providing both IPv4 and IPv6 at the same time, can also guarantee that high-priority Internet activities such as live video transmissions would not be crowded out by music downloads, which are less important.
According to Tom Warger, the College's interim director of information technology, IPv6 was created in response to the ideas that with the growth of the Internet, IP addresses will soon run out and "that inter-domain routing demands would also one day exceed the protocols used in IPv4."
However, when the upgrade will become absolutely necessary is unknown. IPv4 can accommodate about 4.3 billion Internet addresses according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. While that number may seem large, supporters of IPv6 argue that the number does not accommodate each individual with his or her own address and is not enough to support increasing numbers of cellphones, home appliances and climate sensors.
Some note that companies and colleges in Asia and the Pacific Rim are unable to get enough addresses whereas for the United States, the address shortage is a smaller problem because it obtained most of the IP addresses during the Internet's infancy while leaving few for the slower-developing nations.
Jessie Oh '08 agrees that address shortage is in the near future. "As more and more computers and servers are linked to the Internet, I believe that it is very likely that we will run out of unassigned IP addresses if nothing is done," he said. "As such, it would be best to upgrade as soon as possible in order to avoid possible complications in the future."
Despite already-occurring shortages, arguments also exist that claim there is no hurry because the address shortage will not occur in the near future, and colleges are being encouraged to wait before upgrading their networks. "V6 is an effort to solve a problem that hasn't happened yet," Daniel Golding, a senior analyst at the Burton Group, an information-technology consulting company, told The Chronicle.
Warger believes that the College, First World countries and computer users in the rest of the world will not run out of IP addresses in the foreseeable future. However, he added that the College, the US and the First World should not limit IPv6. "[They should not] hold back IPv6 in any way that hurts others," he said.
Warger noted that IPv6 may aid other parts of the world. "There is potentially an element of economic justice and opportunity in the IPv6 issue," he said.
Upgrading to IPv6 is not a priority at the College. "Our top priorities now are: keep strengthening the campus network environment so that it approaches 100 percent uptime and reliability, extend wireless connectivity throughout the student residences and within two years to all offices and selected outdoors places [and] build a storage network so that every member of the college community will have enough room for big items like digital video," Warger said. "[Other priorities include helping] faculty expand their use of IT in their teaching and students in their learning [and] figure out how to use Internet2 to add new resources for education at [the College]."
It is possible that the need to upgrade to IPv6 could be avoided by having several computers share a single IP address. Unfortunately, such a solution also has consequences; shared IP addresses would make it difficult to identify which computer that shares an IP address is being contacted when someone makes an Internet-based phone call.
Because there is a smaller shortage of IP addresses in this country, few institutions feel that upgrading to IPv6 is urgent. As a result, only a handful of institutions have IPv6 connections into campus networks. Even when campuses have the upgrade, it is often not available to the rest of the campus.
Campuses with IPv6 mainly use the technology for research purposes. For example, at Auburn University, IPv6 was not introduced until a computer science researcher requested it. According to The Chronicle, though, demand from researchers is rare because IPv6 is so new that only a few systems or programs use it.
The College has not upgraded to IPv6 nor does it have plans to upgrade, but the University of Massachusetts at Amherst already uses the Internet2 Abilene service which uses IPv6. Some students there will have access to IPv6. "We'll be connected to that network this summer or early fall, and so we might be using IPv6 for some purposes fairly soon," said Warger. "One scenario under which we would need to accommodate IPv6 [is] if somebody at [the College] were working on a research project that involved communicating with an instrument, like a radio telescope, that is on Internet2. In that case, we'd need to be able to handle IPv6 for at least the communications of that user."
The perceived cost and configuration issues involved in upgrading to IPv6 may be why many colleges are choosing not to upgrade now. However, the exact financial burden and difficulty of upgrading may not be as great as perceived.
Configuring computers to use IPv6 is easy and inexpensive because computers running the Microsoft Windows XP operating system or Apple's OS X operating system are already IPv6-ready. Thus, according to The Chronicle, the biggest cost for most institutions may be the labor required to configure and debug the setup.
Low costs do not change the College's plans. "I don't think we want to put IPv6 into our projects list any sooner than necessary," Warger said. "I think the longer we wait the easier and less prone to complications a cut-over will be."
Nonetheless, the College probably would not face great difficulties if it were to upgrade the network. "The College's routing equipment [such as routers and switches] are mostly made by Cisco Systems, the world leader in that technology, so our equipment will support IPv6 soon if it does not already," said Warger.