Semanlink - PBS | I, Cringely . January 12, 2006

Implementing IPv6 will incur an infrastructure cost of around $200 billion, and that's just for the U.S....<br/>In the current addressing scheme, China received a very small number of IP addresses, and this was causing them a lot of difficulty...So they made a national decision to implement IPv6 and put in a good network design...Of course, the rest of the world is still on the old system and to communicate with China an address translation is needed. This is becoming a pain.  Countries who want to do lots of business with China or who want to do lots of business through the Internet (India) are now seriously looking at their own IPv6 plans...
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China has done something very impressive and now others are taking notice.  We (the U.S.) think we control the Internet, but China is proving otherwise.
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And what is happening in the USA?  Well we have Net Neutrality.  We have a telco rebuilding a national monopoly.  We have Cisco and Microsoft working together on Network Admission Control (NAC).  I can see a time in the near future when they'll try to charge me for every PC in my house.  While China is building a national resource, our government is letting companies turn the public Internet into an expensive private toll road.
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But we'll move to IPv6, that's for sure, if only to make sure Halliburton has plenty of business.

2006-11-06 About