Page 56 - SAMENA Trends - September 2021

ARTICLE SAMENA TRENDS

ARTICLE

A New Era of Connectivity is Underway with IPv6+

The digital economy is a crucial engine for national economic
development and will be critical for post-COVID recovery. With the
advancement of digitalization, the adoption of technologies such
as 5G and IoT has significantly accelerated given their status as
essential technology enablers for the increasingly mobile digital
economy. Meanwhile, networks have been facing an incredible
surge in traffic as a result of this always-on connectivity. This has
brought back into focus the migration of internet protocol from
IPv4 to IPv6. We have known for some time now that the IPv4
system has severe limitations. Firstly, there are only 4.3 billion
IPv4 addresses, and these are nearly exhausted. Secondly, private
IPv4 addresses are currently widely used. The Network Address
Translation (NAT) for public and private IPv4 addresses also faces
ongoing delays and low efficiency. Research firm Omdia predicts
there will be 25 billion IoT devices, 2.2 billion industrial IoT devices,
8.6 billion smart home devices, and two billion 5G subscriptions
by 2024.

IPv6+ can accelerate the commercialization
of new Industry 4.0 use cases in
smart transport, smart mining, smart
Mark Oliver manufacturing, and other industries. It does
Senior Consulting Director, Service Provider
OMDIA so by creating on-demand and capillary
networking through the combination
of IPv6 address space for IoT devices
combined with IPv6-based network slicing,
AR/VR, and other technologies.

Therefore, there is an inevitable need for IPv6 in today’s 5G
and cloud era. Whilst IPv6 adoption is not yet commonplace,
commercial deployments are accelerating and governments
around the world have issued policies to promote IPv6 migration.

56 SEPTEMBER 2021