Wednesday, May 07, 2008

1st German IPv6 Summit at Hasso-Plattner-Institute, Potsdam, May, 7-8, 2008

Today, I'm writing about a conference, which I had to organize during the last months: The 1st German IPv6 Summit at Hasso Plattner-Institute (HPI) in Potsdam, May 7-8, 2008. Of course I was supported by a rather commited team here at HPI and - at least up to now - everything works out fine.

The first day is reserved for almost political talks only. Although not so interesting from a technical point of view, political statements about the deployment and status of IPv6 are rather important and might help to progress with the great upcoming transition from the old IPv4 to the future internet IPv6. So, the summit started with two important keynotes by Vivane Reding, EU-Commissioner for Media and Information Society (video link to Viviane Reding's keynote) and Vinton Cerf, Chief Evangelist and Vice President of Google -- and of course 'father of the Internet' (video link to Vinton Cerf's keynote).

Other interesting talks were given by Martin Schallbruch, CIO of the Bundesministerium des Inneren about deployment of IPv6 in the public sector, Prof. Lutz Heuser, Vice President of SAP Research, on the Future Internet, and Detlef Eckert from EU Commision of Media and Information Society about the EU strategy on IPv6 deployment.

In the afternood session, internationale experiences with IPv6 deployment were reported by representatives of the Japanese IPv6 Promotion Council, the IPv6 Forum Malaysia, IPv6 Forum Korea, and Telecom Bretagne.

Anyway, we all know that we are running out of IPv4 address space soon. Although, not everybody takes this warning serious, we should face the possibility that there will be no more IPv4 addresses left after 2012. Of course there will still be the internet there, and of course you will receive also your email....but maybe not necessarely on all your mobile devices (at least if you take into account that 2008 there will be more than 3 billion mobile phones....and most of them are able to access mobile internet...well technically speaking...).

And I almost forgot to mention that yovisto.com is also exhibiting at the IPv6 summit. We succeeded in connecting our search engine to the IPv6 network (we have an IPv6 connection from FSU Jena being provided by University of Potsdam...)

IPv6 summit in the media: