IPv6 Act Now

The IPv4 address range is likely to run out in early 2011. IPv6 offers a far greater number of addresses, but it is incompatible with IPv4.

In this video, industry experts discuss what IT leaders should be doing today on this issue.

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You’ve probably heard of IPv6 by now if you’re watching Internet technology at all, but even with new urgency to its deployment, there aren’t many people saying much about it. There’s a big problem with that.

Over a decade ago, Internet architects realized that the current Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) used for identifying systems on the Internet was limited. With the massive expansion of the Internet in the 1990s, the number of addresses available would simply run out in the not-too-distant future.

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A group of internet engineers and technical staff is helping the Middle East to prepare for new internet technology that will ensure there is enough room for millions more internet addresses as the region’s virtual world expands.

After laying the original groundwork in Dubai to form the Middle East Network Operators’ Group (Menog), the group has hosted a series of regional forums since 2007 to help government and network operators grasp the latest trends in technology.

One of the big challenges looming is that the number of internet addresses is running out of space under the older IPv4 internet protocol, which allows for about 4 billion websites and other devices. IPv6 will allow for approximately 340 undecillion (which is a 34 followed by 35 zeros) addresses. Menog is trying to educate professionals on the best way to handle the seismic shift to a bigger proverbial house with ample room for the future.

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APNIC, which is an administration authority of IP addresses (RIR: Regional Internet Registry) and responsible for the Asia-Pacific region, made an announcement about a rapidly decreasing stock of IPv4 addresses.

IANA, which supervises RIRs, currently has a stock of seven blocks of IPv4 addresses. A block, which is called “/8,” is equivalent to 16,777,216 addresses. In the announcement, APNIC said that IANA will soon distribute two of the remaining seven blocks.

This means that IANA will run out of stock; When the number of blocks owned by IANA becomes five, the five blocks will be automatically distributed to five regions.

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There is a major housing shortage on the Internet.

Historically, every gizmo — PC, networked printer, IP telephone — that communicates with other gizmos over a computer network has been assigned its own, unique number (something like 172.17.60.22) called an IP address. That identifying number is how the InterWeb knows to display this blog post on your laptop, and not on your colleague’s iPad.

The current scheme, called IPv4 in classic nerd-speak, was standardized in the early 1980s and allows for more than 4 billion unique addresses. That must have seemed like plenty at the time. But as networks have proliferated rapidly, both at home and in the office, and more and more people use smart phones and other connected devices the number of available addresses has plummeted rapidly. Estimates vary widely but some credible sources think we could run out of new IP addresses as early as this February.

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We all know that the Internet’s supply of Ipv4 addresses is running ever lower. What you may not know is that IPv4 exhaustion, when we’re completely out of available IPv4 addresses, is approaching even faster than the experts expected. The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) announced at the end of the November that we’re down to 2.73% of the Internet’s available IPv4 addresses. In case you haven’t been watching, that indicates that the long expected run on IPv4 Internet addresses has begun.

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) assigns IPv4 addresses to the regional Internet registry (RIR) in blocks that are equal to 1/256th of the entire IPv4 address space. Each block is referred to as a “/8″ aka “slash-8″ and includes just over 16 million IP addresses. The most recent assignment means that there are now only 7 of these blocks available.

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There are now only seven blocks of IPv4 addresses left in the global pool, and five are already allocated.

Last night, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) doled out two blocks each to a pair of regional internet registries (RIRs) – the American Registry for Internet Numbers and RIPE NCC, which manages Europe and the Middle East – leaving only seven blocks, called /8s, of IPv4 addresses remaining.

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Level(3) is providing IPv6 transit to customers today as they recently delivered this service to one of the TXv6TF board members.

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