this visualization, from the Cooperative association for internet Data analysis (CaiDa), represents macroscopic snapshots of iPv4 and iPv6 internet topology samples captured in January 2009.

that Chicken Little was spouting off about.

The difference is these people got permission to do it. Which leads us to...

 

story 2: Work from the outside in.

Fundamentally, this second strategy is to start with your organization’s external Web presence. Usually an external Web server is hidden behind a hardware device known as a load balancer. When Web browsers connect to your Web site, they are really connecting to the load balancer. It relays the connection (being a “man in the middle”) to the actual Web server. While doing that, it performs many functions— most importantly it load-shares the incoming Web traffic among two or more redundant Web servers.

VIsualIZatIon courtesy oF caIda

In this strategy the goal is simple:
upgrade to IPv6 every component on
the path from your ISP to your load
balancer and let the load balancer
translate to IPv4 for you. Modern load
balancers can receive IPv6 connec-
tions in the “front” and send IPv4 con-
nections out the “back” to your Web
servers. That is, your load balancer can
be a translator that permits you to of-
fer IPv6 service without requiring you
to change your Web servers. Those up-
grades can be phase two.

There are two problems with this. 3 First, the translation is expected to be slow. Second, geolocation will mistakenly identify users as being where the server farm is, not where the user is. That means if your Web site depends on advertising that is geotargeted, the advertisements will be appropriate for the location of server farm; not where your users are. Since LTE is mostly used in mobile devices, this is particularly pressing.

Therefore, if your company wants to ensure that the next million or so new users have fast access to your Web site, 9 or if revenue depends on advertising, then management should be concerned.

Most CEOs can understand simple,
nontechnical, value statements such
as “New people coming onto the Inter-
net will have better access to our site,”
or “It is required to insure that high-
paying, geotargeted advertisements,
continue to work.”
A project like this requires only
modest changes: a few routers, some
DNS records, and so on. It is also a safe
place to make changes because your
external Web presence has a good, sol-
id testing regimen for making changes