This announcement by ICANN to Allocate IPv6 Blocks to the Five RIRs is an important one in several aspects.

First, it marks the real start of IPv6 deployment for the masses. Although this blog has been lucky enough to be hosted on the Restena academic network (linked to Europe’s GEANT2), and therefore was offered an IPv6 range, it is still difficult to convince many of the smaller hosters (and some big ones, too) to routinely offer IPv6 connectivity to their customers.

Your average broadband ISP is not offering IPv6 either. You cannot really blame them, since it is hard to find a DSL router supporting IPv6, unless you want to flash an unsupported firmware. In conclusion, having address space is not enough, we need the pipes and the devices that can use them.

What is also important in the ICANN announcement is that it states all RIRs have received the same amount of address space. This clearly reflects the fact that the Internet is no more US and European centric. Indeed, some regions lika Asia have a real need for more address space, due to their economic development. This is also the place where the deployment of IPv6 has been taking place for a while already.

As an aside, I got this news item thanks to Thomas Roessler’s alternative ICANN RSS feed at http://does-not-exist.org/rss/icann.rss. As mentioned by Bret Fausett, ICANN’s own RSS news feed has not been updated since June 2006.