RFC8200: IPv6 reaches official Standard milestone

RFC8200: IPv6 reaches official Standard milestone

The Deploy360 group within the Internet Society report that at IETF99 in Prague, Czech Republic, the protocol has reached Standard status after RFC8200 was published on 17 July 2017. This culminations the process of the IPv6. It also enhances the challenge posed in IPv6 – 5 years after World IPv6 Launch Day – where are we now? You should start planning for IPv6 today, it's a standard, after all.

In standardising IPv6, the IETF have obsoleted the original RFC2460, and the new RFC8200 becomes STD86. This completes a lot of work that happened in the background since IETF 93 in July 2015, where all the various IPv6 RFC's were identified for updating. (The RFC's for reference are RFC5095, RFC5722, RFC5871, RFC6437, RFC6564, RFC6935, RFC6946, RFC7045, RFC7112, which all the original in various ways.)

Notice that the standard has not adopted two IPv6 RFCs, IPv6 over Social Networks and Scenic Routing for IPv6. These may be incorporated into the standard in the future.

It is nice to see that RFC8200 credits S. Deering and R. Hinden as authors, they wrote the original RFC2640. The IETF have also made sure we have an easy to remember number for IPv6 going forward.

John Dixon

John Dixon is the Principal Consultant of thirteen-ten nanometre networks Ltd, based in Wiltshire, United Kingdom. He has a wide range of experience, (including, but not limited to) operating, designing and optimizing systems and networks for customers from global to domestic in scale. He has worked with many international brands to implement both data centres and wide-area networks across a range of industries. He is currently supporting a major SD-WAN vendor on the implementation of an environment supporting a major global fast-food chain.

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