TPRC46: Research Conference on Communications, Information and Internet Policy
Factors Affecting IPv6 Deployment, Brenden Kuerbis, Georgia Institute of Technology – School of Public Policy
Internet protocol version 6 (IPv6) expands the Internet’s address space, but is incompatible with IPv4, the protocol on which global Internetworking is based. A complete transition will require billions of users and hundreds of thousands of organizations to implement a new technical standard that is not backwards compatible with the existing deployments of IPv4. This means that IPv6 does not replace IPv4; networks that implement IPv6 must run both protocols at the same time (dual stack). Our basic research questions are:
- What economic incentives affect migration under dual stack conditions?
- What economic, policy and social factors can best explain the observed levels of IPv6 adoption at the country level?
- Will migration equilibrate on a “mixed” world of IPv6 and IPv4, or will we be able to turn off IPv4 eventually?
