IPv6 is old news at Verizon Communications Inc., which has nine years’ experience at operating native-mode Version 6. The carrier supplies IPv6-capable virtual private networks to the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet and the Defense Research and Engineering Network.

“If you don’t operate in a native V6 environment, you don’t understand how V6 works,” says Marlin Forbes, Verizon’s regional vice president for defense and international services. “V6 supplies an auditable quality of service for what goes over the network, which IPv4 doesn’t allow. That means a quality marker for voice communications, which can’t tolerate much delay. Video can take a little more delay. With data, you have to make sure certain packets go to the head of the queue.”

All Verizon’s V6 customers, including the government, get quality-of-service assurance. For security assurance, the Defense Department’s VPNs are invisible to other customers, and vice versa.

DOD does not yet have a large number of V6 customers, Forbes says, but it needs V6’s huge address space to assign unique IP addresses to individual network-centric warfare devices so it can literally send commands on the fly, for example, to a warhead en route to the target. That means V6 is driving net-centricity.

Verizon, however, is “not seeing a rush to V6 yet,” he adds. “All the quality of service and security issues, and the convergence of voice, video and data, have to be sorted out. You can’t catch all of that in a queue and still direct the warhead successfully.”

Like DOD and its contractors, Verizon has not seen a large cost to its V6 adoption. “Verizon built those networks around V6 to begin with, and they’re our crown jewel to show how to implement V6 for everyone,” Forbes says.

One other advantage of V6, Forbes says, is that “address fields are set aside in the protocol that might be able to detect and defeat denial-of-service attacks. That needs to be defined better, but you can’t do it in V4.”

For the time being, IPv4 remains the dominant protocol. “There’s still space in V4,” he says. “Internet growth has slowed, although it’s still growing by 200 percent a year in the United States and far faster elsewhere. Schemes such as tunneling have kept IPv4 very viable, but it’s not good for the long haul.”

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