Category: CEA

Oct 02

CEA Webinar Archive: Making Content Available On IPv6 and Ensuring the Optimal Customer Experience

CEA IPv6 Content WebinarHow can you make your content available over IPv6 and ensure the optimal customer experience?  That was the topic of a excellent recent webinar from the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) on September 16, 2014,  featuring these panelists:

  • John Jason Brzozowski, Comcast (and CEA IPv6 Working Group chair)
  • Leslie Daigle, TCE
  • Vint Cerf, Google
  • Jason Fesler, Yahoo!

The session is now available for your listening and viewing at:

https://consumerelectronics.adobeconnect.com/_a89885078/p2d42e4ygya/

The abstract for the session is:

While some mainstream content providers have enabled their content to be available over both IPv4 and IPv6, a large population of the same continues to be available only over IPv4. Join this webinar to learn why making your content available over IPv6 is critical to the IPv6 transition and more importantly to ensure an optimal customer experience. As part of this webinar, manufacturers, service providers and retailers in the consumer electronics industry will learn why support for IPv6 is important as the steps required to ensure popular consumer electronics are enabled to support and actively using the same.

It was great to hear Leslie Daigle again (given that she used to be involved here) and she started out the session providing statistics about IPv6 and speaking about the impressive growth we’ve seen over the past few years.

Vint Cerf spoke next and first talked about Google’s strong commitment to IPv6 and then discussed what is happening with Nest thermometers (owned by Google) and the new “Thread” protocol being advanced by a group of companies as a method of enabling the “Internet of Things (IoT)”.  Thread is based on IPv6 using the 6LoWPAN technology and provides a powerful way to interconnect devices and services. (I’ll note that earlier this week there was apparently a gathering at Google’s California campus where many people involved with Thread met and provided an update on the project.)

Jason Fesler then spoke about the business case for deploying IPv6 for content providers.  His number one reason was that companies need to “ensure the best possible user experience for our customers.”   He noted that it is not a matter so much of what IPv6 brings us, but rather what is the future of IPv4.  He talked about the challenges of carrier-grade NAT (CGN) and how it limits the ability of a content provider to optimize content for an individual user. He also spoke of  the dangers of CGN in potentially blocking an entire network due to a single bad actor.   Jason then discussed how Yahoo! is preparing to make its web sites and content available to IPv6-only networks, as they do expect to see more of such networks in the years ahead.

After the presentations there was a lengthy Q&A session and more ongoing discussion.

This CEA Webinar was the second in a series of webinars about IPv6.  The first was last month and focused on IPv6 and broadband.  My colleague Phil Roberts wrote about that session (and participated in it) and provided the link to the archive of that session.

It’s great to see these sessions coming from the CEA  and we look forward to future webinars!

If you want to get started making your content available over IPv6, please visit our Start Here page to find resources available to help you. In particular, the IPv6 information for website owners and content providers may be of great help.

Jan 10

CES 2014: CEA Announces IPv6 Specification For Consumer Electronics

CEA logoWe were very pleased to read the news earlier this week coming out of the 2014 International CES event that the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) had selected “IPv6 Implementation Standards” to be one of two standards programs in its “CESpec” program.  As stated in the CEA’s news release:

The CESpec program aims to draw worldwide attention to important, new industry standards at CES. Standards selected for the 2014 CESpec program are expected to be completed by the 2015 International CES.

We are delighted to see this focus on IPv6 within the CEA and look forward to learning more about their plans over the next year. As long-time readers may recall, we attended the 2012 International CES event and met with multiple vendors to talk about IPv6.  We also know of some of the folks involved with the CEA IPv6 Working Group and would encourage any other CEA members to become more involved with that group.  As the announcement notes:

Fifteen organizations joined CEA in 2011 to form the IPv6 Working Group. The group coordinates CE manufacturers, service providers and retailers activities as the Internet transitions from IPv4 addressing to IPv6 ensuring Internet-enabled devices continue to operate without interruption. It is expected to result in a standard that defines necessary feature sets for several levels of IPv6 support, creating profiles for Basic, Basic-plus and Advanced IPv6-capable devices.

The simplest networking devices such as network printers, alarms and home automation systems are Basic devices that will support a limited set of IPv6 features. More Internet capability is appropriate for the Basic-plus profile group: optical disc players, game consoles, smart TVs and media servers. Advanced devices are those that need the most Internet capability and include PCs, tablets and smartphones.

And we very much agree with both of these quotes from the working group co-chairs, Hans Liu, director of software architecture at D-Link Systems Inc. and Dan Torbet, director of system engineering at ARRIS:

“IPv6 is the next generation of Internet protocol, and it’s being rolled out throughout the Web,” said Liu. “Our goal is to help speed this transition by providing guidance to consumer equipment manufacturers to ensure their products make maximum use of IPv6.”

“The more IPv6 capability is implemented in consumer products, the more efficiently Internet service can be delivered to consumers,” said Torbet. “We’re very happy to have this project featured as a CESpec and we look forward to demonstrating our work next year.”

We, too, are looking forward to their demonstrations of IPv6 work next year at the 2015 International CES!