The Internet engineering community says its biggest mistake in developing IPv6 - a long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol - is that it lacks backwards compatibility with the existing Internet Protocol, known as
IPv4.
At a panel discussion held here Tuesday, leaders of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) admitted that they didn’t do a good enough job making sure native IPv6 devices and networks would be able to communicate with their IPv4-only counterparts when they designed the industry standard 13 years ago.
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"The lack of real backwards compatibility for IPv4 was the single critical failure," says Leslie Daigle, Chief Internet Technology Officer for the Internet Society. "There were reasons at the time for doing that…But the reality is that nobody wants to go to IPv6 unless they think they’re friends are doing it, too."
