Communiqués de presse et articles sur IPv6

Upgrade aims to avert crisis of congestion in cyberspace New Internet Protocol version can handle astronomical number of Net addresses.
by Kevin Marron, Globe & Mail, 8 juin 2001
Marc Blanchet is trying to stop the Internet from going off the tracks.
Acutely aware that the worlds of telecommunications and e-business are growing too fast for the 20-year-old Internet Protocol that directs traffic over wirelines and airwaves, Mr. Blanchet is one of the engineers of an upgrade designed to avert this crisis of congestion in cyberspace. "We need to change the rails," says the president of Quebec City-based Viagénie Inc.
He and other experts warn that tech and telecom firms could be sidelined if they don't act soon to upgrade from Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) to Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), a new standard designed by an international Internet engineering task force.
North American companies are lagging those in Europe and Asia in preparing to upgrade, says William Maton, network engineer at the Ottawa-based Communications Research Council Canada. "We could be caught with our pants down."
The potential crisis arises from the fact that IPv4 cannot handle more than about four billion Internet addresses. This seemed more than enough 20 years ago when the Internet was designed as an academic and research network.
But it could cause gridlock in a world where Net addresses will be needed for billions of computers, mobile phones, handheld organizers, game consoles and digital cameras, as well as cars, vending machines, home-security systems and other appliances and devices.
The problem already has become obvious in Asia and Europe, but North American companies are more complacent, Mr. Blanchet says, for a simple reason: Internet addresses, like telephone numbers, include routing instructions that direct traffic to specific geographic areas. About 74 per cent of the available addresses have been dedicated to North America, leaving the rest of the world -- with 95 per cent of Earth's population -- scrambling for the remainder.
The designers of IPv6 did not want to make the same mistake that was made 20 years earlier. The new protocol can handle a number of addresses so astronomical it almost defies imagination. There will be 10 to the power of 38 addresses available -- a number composed of one followed by 38 zeros. There could be more Internet addresses than stars in the sky or grains of sand on Earth.
Mr. Maton says the abundance of addresses will allow all kinds of unforeseen developments and new ways of using the Internet. "There's no reason why everything could not be IP-enabled. What if we haven't thought about the IP-enabled tire? It may not happen, but we have to give ourselves enough slack to take that into account," he says.
IPv6 will not only solve the problem of address space, it also will provide a faster, more secure and more efficient way of directing traffic in cyberspace, according to Al Javed, chief technology officer for wireless Internet at Brampton, Ont.-based Nortel Networks Corp.
Mr. Javed, the keynote speaker at an international forum on IPv6 held in Ottawa last month, says the almost limitless store of permanent Internet addresses will eliminate the need for temporary addresses commonly used today by most dial-up and wireless Internet users, which conserve address space but make networks more cumbersome and difficult to manage.
With temporary addresses, wireless phones can be used only to "pull" content from the Internet. A handset has to tell a Web site what address it is using for the Web site to send the information to the right place. With a permanent address, on the other hand, Web sites can "push" information to any phone at any time because they know where to send it, Mr. Javed explains.
This makes IPv6 an attractive proposition for wireless carriers because it provides an opportunity to offer more personalized Web-based services, he says.
Permanent addresses, as well as the ability to direct traffic more efficiently, also make IPv6 a better technology for streaming media, interactive games, voice phone calls on the Internet and other activities that involve sending live content directly over the Internet, according to Mr. Maton.
Mr. Blanchet says it also provides better security because packets of information can be traced to the permanent address of the device that sent them. Hackers will find it harder to conceal their identity.
Patrick Grossetete, IPv6 project manager at San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco Systems Inc., says the catch is that IPv6 is expensive to deploy because it involves a steep learning curve and the labour-intensive task of installing new software while figuring out how to integrate it with existing technology.
He says it is similar in scope to the massive Y2K effort that went into making technology comply with the date change from 1999 to 2000, because network managers must go through every device on their networks to determine what needs to be upgraded.
Wireless companies have an incentive to upgrade to IPv6, as do many technology and telecommunications companies in Europe and Asia, where the demand for new addresses is more immediate.
But the issue has yet to hit the radar screens of most North American companies, Mr. Maton says. He notes that the last time he tried to talk about IPv6 with a busy Internet service provider, the response he got was, "Get a life."
It's a chicken-and-egg situation, says Erone Quek, director of IP technology for Bell Canada, a division of Montreal-based BCE Inc. "Nobody will develop applications for IPv6 unless there is a critical mass of users, and nobody will switch until there are applications."
Governments in Europe and Asia are considering tax breaks to encourage companies to upgrade, but that's not likely for North America "because it is not in our culture to go that route," Mr. Javed says.
Meanwhile, Mr. Blanchet notes, Japanese telecommunications giant NTT-DoCoMo Inc. is already deploying a worldwide IPv6 network. Mr. Maton predicts there soon will be an explosion in demand for IPv6 technologies in Europe and Asia, and the use of the new protocol will lead to the development of new and creative ways of using the Internet for entertainment, business networks and industrial applications.
But Mr. Blanchet says North American telecom and networking industries could be taken by surprise by Japanese technology in much the same way the automobile industry was 30 years ago.
"If they [the North American companies] wait too long, others will take the market," he says.
Mr. Maton agrees. "North America could end up being the techno-peasant in the IPv6 world. We could have Asia and Europe doing their wonderful things, using IPv6 as an enabler, while we'll be lagging behind, and people will wonder why."

Viagénie annonce la nouvelle version de son serveur de tunnels IPv6
http://www.viagenie.qc.ca/fr/nouvelles/commdepresse/tunnel-server_press release-200105.pdf, mai 2001
Lors du congrès IPv6Forum, Marc Blanchet a annoncé que maintenant Freenet6, le serveur de tunnels IPv6 conçu par Viagénie, permet non seulement d'allouer des adresses, mais aussi des préfixes IPv6.

6000 milliards de milliards d'adresses IP grâce à une firme de Québec
Jean-François Codère, mmedium, 17 février 2000
Un des fondements même d'Internet, le protocole IPv4, qui régit notamment l'attribution des adresses IP, est à la veille de céder sa place. Beaucoup plus prometteur, le protocole IPv6 est déjà utilisé et testé par quelques utilisateurs initiés. Viagénie, une firme de Québec, figure parmi les pionniers du futur protocole. Viagénie travaille sur le protocole IPv6 depuis 1994, alors que le Web était encore presque inconnu du grand public, et s'y consacre intensément depuis 1996. Le président de Viagénie, Marc Blanchet, est une figure connue en ce qui a trait au protocole TCP/IP. Notamment l'auteur du livre TCP/IP simplifié, il est régulièrement invité à donner des conférences ou à siéger sur différents comités de travail internationaux. Si le passage au protocole IPv6 est nécessaire, c'est en raison du nombre sans cesse croissant d'appareils connectés à Internet (ordinateur, téléphone, téléphone cellulaire, radio, réfrigérateur...). Tranquillement, les adresses IP [lexique] deviennent de plus en plus rares avec le protocole IPv4. Le nouveau protocole multipliera le nombre d'adresses disponibles par 296. Selon Marc Blanchet, il y aura donc 6 000 milliards de milliards (vous avez bien lu...) d'adresses IP par mètre carré de superficie sur la planète. Ce ne serait pas la première déduction erronée dans l'histoire de l'informatique, mais IPv6 n'est probablement pas à la veille d'être saturé... Évidemment, comme pour n'importe quel protocole du genre (les numéros de téléphone par exemple), ces adresses ne sont pas toutes utilisables. Selon Marc Blanchet, environ 10 à 20% des adresses seront utilisées pour augmenter l'efficacité du routage des données. «C'est encore amplement suffisant», rétorque-t-il. La généralisation de IPv6 rendra les serveurs de nom de domaine (Domain Name Server, DNS) essentiels. C'est que les adresses IP (connues actuellement sous la forme X.X.X.X où X est un chiffre de 0 à 255) deviendront beaucoup plus difficiles à mémoriser et à retranscrire. Les nouvelles adresses seront formées de huit groupes de quatre caractères hexadécimaux (les chiffres de 0 à 9 ou les lettres de A à F) séparés par des «:». Exemple: «4FC0:65B4:3FFE:0C00:36CC:7AA1:88E8:5AB4». Nul doute qu'il sera plus pratique d'inscrire «www.multimedium.com»! Le nouveau protocole amènera également plusieurs nouvelles possibilités telles que l'auto-configuration, ce qui facilitera grandement la vie des fabricants de téléphone cellulaire branchés sur le Net, par exemple. Récemment, l'équipe de Viagénie s'est livrée à un petit exercice de démonstration. Elle a converti le populaire jeu Quake afin qu'il soit compatible au protocole IPv6. Ce jeu a été choisi parce que son code source est disponible et qu'il est offert sur plusieurs plate-formes. Régulièrement, des parties en réseau sont organisées entre les membres de l'équipe de Viagénie, auxquels se joignent plusieurs autres personnes, notamment en provenance du Japon. «Les Japonais ont embarqué très rapidement avec nous dans ce projet et nous ont beaucoup aidé», explique Marc Blanchet.

Viagénie reçoit une subvention de Canarie
http://www.canarie.ca/frn/outreach/publications/news/CommJan2000_f.pdf, janvier 2000
Viagénie est la première compagnie à recevoir la subvention ANAST, projet Advanced Network Technology, de Canarie pour son nouveau projet de R&D sur la création d'applications et de services, version IPv6.