Did NTT America have any reservations about completing its IPv6 migration early?
Junkins: Obviously, we approached it very, very cautiously. We do run a global network that many of our customers rely on every day for running their businesses, and if our network goes down, those customers are losing money.
Obviously, we have to be very careful in that regard. But with the [equipment] testing we were able to do to match all of the IPv4 testing, we were very confident that we were not going to run into any major issue by enabling IPv6 on our network.
The benefit of being able to show that IPv6 is a usable technology and the technology for the future was worth the small amount of risk that we couldn't avoid. In hindsight, we have not had any major router issues that we can trace to the fact that we have enabled IPv6.
What kind of applications has the IPv6 migration enabled that weren't possible with IPv4?
Junkins: In Japan, one of the applications that NTT developed that uses IPv6 pretty much relies on it. It requires the unique end identifiers that IPv6 allows. They have an earthquake detection system that can detect the early waves of an earthquake and actually broadcast that to a set of IPv6-enabled receivers in people's homes. It will give them at least a few seconds to minutes warning before an earthquake, so they have some time to take shelter or take whatever measures they can in the limited time they have.
By using IPv6, we've been able to make sure all of those broadcasts and devices have a unique end identifier -- that they can send information back if necessary and things like that -- rather than being behind a firewall or behind a network address translation device in the home or in the home gateway.