IPv6: When do you really need to switch?
08 Jun 2012
For many users, though, the questions of what, when and why still await answers.
Everyone in networking knows that they should be switching to IPv6. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) realised that in 1994, when it predicted that IPv4′s 4.3 billion addresses wouldn’t be enough. Its answer was IPv6. With its 128-bit address space it can have up to 2^128 addresses — that’s 40,282,366,920 billion billion billion usable addresses. Even an interstellar internet won’t run out of numbers any time soon.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, the regional internet registries (RIRs) in charge of parceling out IP addresses are down to their last old-style IPv4 addresses. Indeed, the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) ran out of IPv4 addresses in April 2011. RIPE NCC, Europe’s RIR, will be the next to run out sometime in August. In North America, the last IPv4 address will be assigned in June 2013.
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