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Technical Article: IPv6: The views from industry

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From Lynn A Linse, Principal Engineer, Digi International

Modern trends in Network-Address-Translation (NAT) and the widespread use of the Internet-community sanctioned 'Private Address' ranges like 10.x.x.x and 192.168.x.x have largely made IPv6 a non-issue for industry. Since most SCADA and automation users are on private networks anyway, using a 10.x.x.x address scheme offers for example over 65 thousand subnets with 250+ nodes each. Few automation systems would use even 1% of this address space. Even if industry starts making wider use of wireless 'Public' IP nodes, the addresses used will be provided by the service provider.

IPv6 makes sense and will eventually become the norm, but the 2 major driving forces for IPv6 are 1) mobile users (ie: an roaming IP for your car, cell-phone, PDA, delivery trucks, valuable packages, etc) and 2) political - it is very galling to immense countries like China that large USA universities have more legal IPv4 addresses than the whole of China can ever have.

So more than anything, companies selling internationally (outside the USA) will increasingly find IPv6 mentioned as a 'check-mark' on the Request-for-Quotation. It may not be required for operation, but will be useful for marketing. I would not be surprised if in the next few years China places import restrictions on products NOT supporting IPv6. I know of some Asian automation companies adding IPv6 to products expressly because their large North American competitors are not.

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