UPDATED 12:19 EDT / FEBRUARY 02 2011

IPv4 Going Extinct, It’s Way Beyond Time We Started Migrating to IPv6

ipv6-is-a-big-number “You have reached the end of the Internet. Please go back.”

According to the Internet Address and Naming Agency (IANA), which hands out blocks of Internet addresses, they will be allocating the last seven remaining blocks this month. The IPv4 address set has over 4 billion addresses and it’s taken us almost 40 years to use them all up, but the rate at which our society uses Internet addresses is logarithmic and it’s not going to slow its momentum just because we’re running low on this resource.

What could running out of addresses mean for us?

Well, the Guardian UK paints a pointedly grim future for Internet connectivity if our software and routing infrastructure doesn’t get on the ball already:

This could mean that in a year’s time you may hear about a new site – yet when you type its address into a web browser or click a link to it on a web page, your computer simply won’t connect to it because it will use an addressing system entirely different to the one used before.

It could even get worse than that, according to James Blessing, a member of the board of the UK’s Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA). “You might find that you can’t get online unless someone else goes offline,” he said. “It would be like the internet before broadband, when everything was on dial-up modems, and if too many people were dialing in then you couldn’t get connected.”

This problem has been exacerbated, the article goes on, by a multitude of things only one of which is the reluctance of governments to subsidize routing that would energize the next-gen addressing system IPv6 until the very last moment. And we’re looking at the 11th Hour right now. This is especially true with each new smartphone being released capable of using its own IP address, and the rise of the Internet of Things where everyday devices will be network-capable and therefore need addressing space. And don’t underestimate the necessity of putting the cloud-development into IPv6, companies like Juniper Networks have already mulled this one over.

Constellations of new devices are appearing every day that want to talk to other devices and the way that we’ll do this is through addressing them. Until we finally migrate, we can cluster them into subnetworks that hide behind individual addresses and translate communication without adding too many to the global addresses (like multiple people living at a house) but even that won’t be a positive solution for very long.

We’re running out of space. If the Internet were a city, we’d start building up by now instead of spreading out.

But we have a savior, it’s called IPv6 and it contains so many addresses I can’t write the number without resorting to scientific notation: 3.4 × 1038 addresses total. For the trivia buffs in my audience, that’s over 340 undecillion addresses. (Yes, I learned a new giant-number name today, just to describe how huge the IPv6 address space happens to be.) Compared to 40 billion, we’re not going to run out anytime soon—but the problem is going to be the migration and we need to start doing it soon.

Preferably, our smartphones and other devices that depend on hardware and firmware will have to start enabling access to this new address space as soon as possible, even before the Internet infrastructure starts to let the bits flow using these addresses. Operating systems on computers may not be quite ready for this (especially anything a decade out) but newer OSes such as Windows and MacOS have the underlying architecture already present, they just need to patch themselves to get it going.

Fortunately, some Internet sites have already been dabbling in IPv6, such as Facebook. It’s predicted that in a span of about 12 to 18 months there will be sites cropping up that only use IPv6 addressing. To access those, users will have to be on devices and OSes that can handle it.

Now, really, initially many users won’t need to worry so much about if their system can handle IPv6 addressing or not as most web pages will not end up there. Instead, we should be putting new devices and Internet uses on those addresses. All the old websites (and hopefully many of the new ones) should still be using IPv4 for legacy devices and OSes. Home users would still be able to set up their old computers to connect to the Internet using routers that could let a household use an IPv6 address even if their OS wouldn’t know what to do with it.

In under two years, SiliconANGLE might be reporting on the big crunch and how the current Internet infrastructure is handling the transition to devices and websites that fully support IPv6. Let’s hope that it’s exciting rather than frustrating.


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