Sophia Antipolis, 27 April 2015

IP6 Industry Specification Group to help stakeholders adopt IPv6 and anticipate IPv4 address exhaustion

ETSI’s newly established IP6 Industry Specification Group (ISG), created to focus on better IPv6 integration and deployment, held its kickoff meeting on 22-23 April at ETSI, Sophia Antipolis, France.

IPv6 was developed to address IPv4 address exhaustion and enable new internet services with improved end to end security. ETSI’s new specification group will focus on scenarios, use cases and best practices to foster IPv6 integration and deployment in a variety of targeted communities. The first targets will be governments, enterprises, emergency and public safety organizations, internet service providers and mobile operators, academia and education. Use of IPv6 in new technologies will also be addressed, in particular Internet of Things and Machine to Machine communications, Software Defined Networking and Network Functions Virtualization, cloud computing and smart grids, to name a few. But overall, IP6 ISG will focus on integrating the IPv6 protocol into the next generation of mobile telecommunications, 5G systems, looking at the complete wireless network and the full spectrum of mobile wireless technologies. 

At this first meeting, Mr. Latif Ladid was elected as Chair of the group. He is currently the president of the IPv6 Forum and a Research Fellow at the University of Luxembourg. Mrs. Yanick Pouffary and Mr. Patrick Wetterwald, respectively from Hewlett-Packard and Cisco Systems, were elected as vice-chairmen.

“IP6 ISG was created to help guarantee the growth of the internet and make sure that all parts of the world, including Africa, Latin America and Asia, will be connected, as we are running out of IPv4 addresses", says Luis Jorge Romero, ETSI Director General. “Some large mobile operators have already implemented this protocol and with the arrival of the Internet of Things and the growing number of connected devices round the world, IPv6 becomes a necessity.”

Widespread adoption of IPv6 has been slow but new internet services are driving IPv6 deployment and if the current trend continues, we should achieve 50% penetration by 2017. IPv6 uses a 128-bit address, allowing 2128 addresses, that is more than 7.9×1028 times as many as IPv4, this much larger address space should be sufficient for the foreseeable future. IPv6 also offers many other benefits and enhanced features compared to IPv4, such as simplified processing by routers, Quality of Service, security, IP mobility, etc. But it must cope with the demand and anticipate the full expansion of internet requirements in all parts of the world, without creating a digital divide, providing everyone and all industries with the IP addresses they need.

Participation in the IP6 Industry Specification Group is open to all ETSI members as well as organizations who are not members, subject to signing ISG Agreements. For more information on how to participate please contact ISGsupport@etsi.org.

About ETSI
ETSI produces globally-applicable standards for Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), including fixed, mobile, radio, converged, aeronautical, broadcast and internet technologies and is officially recognized by the European Union as a European Standards Organization. ETSI is an independent, not-for-profit association whose more than 800 member companies and organizations, drawn from 64 countries, determine its work programme and participate directly in its work.

Contact
Claire Boyer
Tel: +33 (0)4 92 94 43 35
Mob: +33 (0)6 87 60 84 40
Email: claire.boyer@etsi.org