Owen DeLong - Content Providers must lead the way to IPv6

2025 Note: This article was written 15 years ago, and it is interesting to note that at that time IPv6 was very much a thing starting to come onto people’s radar. That, well, never really materialised. We still have hosting companies offering IPv6 behind a check box, and certainly very few people are thinking in IPv6 terms first. IPv4 still very much rules the roost.

Onto number 5 with my run down and onto a talk by Owen DeLong entitled Content Providers must lead the way to IPv6.

Owen is an IPv6 Evangelist with Hurricane Electric who gave a rather worrying talk about how we are going to need to move to IPv6 sooner rather than later.

Networking is a very dry subject matter and even an Evangelist like Owen could do little to spark up too much in the way of excitement about the topic but it is very important and something we need to be paying attention to.

Owen’s talk focused on the fact that IPv4 addresses are running out and could be gone in 2011.  What this means is ISPs and hosting companies have very little time to get their infrastructure sorted in order to deal with both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic.

The main action point I took from the talk was that I need to contact hosting providers for my websites and find out what provisions they have made for IPv6, because it was clear from the talk that the days of IPv4 are drawing to a close and whilst there will be IPv4 legacy systems in place for some time it will begin to get phased out sooner rather than later.

Owen hosted a University session later on in the day which covered how you can prepare your servers which I will talk about in a later post.