Google: IPv6 is easy, not expensive

Google engineers say it was not expensive and required only a small team of developers to enable all of the company’s applications to support IPv6, a long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet’s main communications protocol.

“We can provide all Google services over IPv6,” said Google network engineer Lorenzo Colitti during a panel discussion held here Tuesday at a meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

Colitti said a “small, core team” spent 18 months enabling IPv6, from the initial network architecture and software engineering work, through a pilot phase, until Google over IPv6 was made publicly available. Google engineers worked on the IPv6 effort as a 20% project – meaning it was in addition to their regular work – from July 2007 until January 2009.

Building a pilot IPv6 network “was not expensive,” said Colitti, who recommended rolling out IPv6 in stages. “There’s nothing inherently unreliable about IPv6.”

Google is already reaping the benefits of IPv6. “It’s refreshingly simple” to look at a network with globally addressable devices, Colitti said.

Google’s comments at the IETF meeting come days after the Web leader held a conference in Mountain View, Calif., for IPv6 implementers.

Also in March, Google published a manifesto on its public policy blog explaining why IPv6 matters.

Google’s experience with IPv6 is significant because only a handful of leading-edge U.S. companies have embraced the next-generation Internet protocol.

The IETF created IPv6 in 1995 as a replacement to the existing version of the Internet Protocol, known as IPv4.

IPv6 is needed because the Internet is running out of IPv4 addresses. IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses and can support approximately 4.3 billion individually addressed devices on the Internet. IPv6, on the other hand, uses 128-bit addresses and can support so many devices that only a mathematical expression — 2 to the 128th power — can quantify its size.

Experts predict IPv4 addresses will be gone by 2012. At that point, all ISPs, government agencies and corporations will need to support IPv6 on their backbone networks.

Besides Google, other early adopters of IPv6 include the U.S. federal government and Bechtel.

Colitti said Google has accepted that IPv6 is a requirement for any company that wants to see the Internet continue to operate and to support new applications and users.

Colitti said the business case for IPv6 is that new devices such as set-top boxes will increasingly support IPv6. In addition, IPv6 will reduce the infrastructure and support costs associated with the alternative to IPv6, which is multiple layers of network address translators (NATs) being installed on the Internet.

“Unless you have a monopoly, you better not be last to market” with IPv6, Colitti warned. “Even if you believe IPv6 will never take on, you might want to hedge your bets.”

Colitti said IPv6 must be rolled out in production mode or it won’t be used.

“If you have production-quality IPv6, you can get most Google services over IPv6,” Colitti said, pointing out that the main Google Web site, Google News, Google Docs, Google Calendar and Google Maps all support IPv6.

Colitti warned that IPv6 traffic “will appear overnight,” as Google experienced in March when its IPv6 traffic grew three-fold after Google Maps was IPv6-enabled.