Subject: Fw: DoC Report on New Internet Protocol

From: "George T. Willingmyre" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 2 Feb 2006 10:47:50 -0500

Gregory Tassey's distribution of the  report    "Technical and Economic Assessment of Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6)"  at http://www.nist.gov/director/prog-ofc/IPv6-final.pdf  is surly to be of interest to members of this list. 

George T. Willingmyre, P.E.
GTW Associates
301 421 4138 facsimile 301 421 0977
www.gtwassociates.com

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Gregory Tassey 
To: Distribution 
Sent: Thursday, February 02, 2006 9:26 AM
Subject: DoC Report on New Internet Protocol

A Department of Commerce Task Force has recently completed a technical and economic assessment of the next-generation Internet Protocol, version 6 (IPv6). The Task Force report can be accessed at http://www.nist.gov/director/planning/policy_studies.htm along with a supporting contractor (RTI International) report that provides more detailed economic analysis.

The Task Force was established by a directive in a 2003 White House report, National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace. This directive was motivated by propositions that the transition to IPv6 should be accelerated to provide enhanced cyberspace security and to respond to deployment strategies in other economies. It was realized that the prospect of increased costs to government and industry by an accelerated transition needed to be assessed relative to projected benefits (economic growth, national security, etc.).

This report should be of interest to the S&T policy arena, as it provides a comprehensive analysis of the technical and economic issues involved during transition between generations of an industry standard. Given that the Task Force analysis was conducted during the initial phase of transition, the ability to obtain data sufficient to undertake quantitative analysis was limited. Still, the report includes some insights into what kinds of analysis will be needed in the future to inform S&T policy over a multi-year transition. See the supporting RTI study for more detail on such analysis.

The IP is arguably one of the most important of all industry standards, as it enables the operation of the Internet infrastructure and the many applications that run on it. It is also one of the most complex standards. This complexity and the consequent prospect of substantial transition costs for the entire Internet supply chain has induced repeated "patching" of the current version (IPv4) over its 20-year existence. In fact, the substantial "installed base" of IPv4 infrastructure and IPv4 applications acts as a disincentive to investment in the new Protocol. As a result, the transition will take years and, therefore, will result in a dual-standard environment for some time. These conditions create the potential for large transition costs and negative economic impacts, if the transition is not managed efficiently.

The Task Force examined a range of potential domestic and global market barriers that, if present, could justify government intervention in the transition process. The increasing international volume and character of Internet services and the growing number of incentives provided by other governments for migrating their domestic industries to IPv6 require continued monitoring of the potential market barriers assessed in the report to inform analyses of policy options. In this context, OMB, in response to recent global trends, is developing guidance for all federal agencies to accelerate the transition to IPv6.

Comments are welcome.

Regards,

Greg Tassey

P.S. Some of you are on more than one of my distribution lists. If so, you are receiving more than one copy of this email. My apologies.
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