Potential Impacts on Communications from IPv4 Exhaustion & IPv6 Transition
Discusses the Internet’s Difficult Migration to New IPv6 Address Space
Robert Cannon, OSP, December 2010
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) today released the third of its new FCC Staff Working Papers. This agency-wide research paper series replaced all of the earlier working paper series that had been issued by individual bureaus and offices. It is intended to encourage staff research that furthers the “expert” function of the agency and builds agency intellectual capital. This active research program is managed by the Office of Strategic Planning and Policy Analysis (OSP).
The new paper is “Potential Impacts on Communications from IPv4 Exhaustion & IPv6 Transition” by Robert Cannon, a Senior Attorney in OSP. His paper explains why, with the exhaustion of Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) addresses looming, there is insufficient time to complete the full transition to IPv6. The paper also explains how the implementation of IPv4 workarounds, while making that old protocol more efficient, are creating new problems of their own.
The full text of this working paper is available at http://www.fcc.gov/papers/. The OSP contact is Chuck Needy, who can be reached at chuck.needy@fcc.gov.
