If the Doomsday Clock strikes midnight before INTEC Systems Institute’s IPv4 Exhaustion Counter reaches zero, it won’t matter if we run out of version 4 IP addresses. But if you have a business or a network to run and aren’t convinced that the rapture is right around the corner, you might want to pull your team together and get serious about getting IPv6 compliant.
Yes, you’ve heard this before. But new people are saying it now, people with less of a vested interest than the startup network equipment vendors who tried to convince you that the IP address sky was falling five years ago. People like Richard Jimmerson, chief information office at the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN).
“Depletion is real. Don’t get caught,” Jimmerson said.
A couple of things will cause IPv4 address depletion to cross a tipping point toward rapid exhaustion, Jimmerson said: an aggressive push toward smart grid technology and the proliferation of mobile data devices. There are more, too, such as the rapid growth of Asian and African markets and home networking.
The Number Resource Organization said that the global deployment of IPv6 is vital to the continuing growth and stability of the Internet. To date, the organization said in its contribution to an ITU-T IPv6 Study Group, combined IPv6 allocations to network operators by the five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) comprises enough address space to accommodate more than 2 trillion end users. It is more than 500 times bigger than the entire IPv4 address pool. And that’s only the allocated space, which is only 0.003 percent of the entire IPv6 address pool.
So it isn’t as if the space is not there to migrate to. And with less than 10 percent of IPv4 address space still available, time truly is running out. In fact, at the current rate of consumption, the date for unallocated address pool exhaustion is July 27, 2012. That isn’t a magical day when the last IPv4 address is allocated, but a date by which the allocation process itself breakdown because the amount of addresses no longer supports it.
Jimmerson thinks the end may come as soon as mid- to late next year.
With 13.67 percent of Ipv4 address unavailable and 76.17 percent already allocated, only 10.16 percent remain. Jimmerson said that IPv6 will return the Internet to an end-to-end model where dynamic address allocation is no longer required. “Dynamic address allocation breaks a lot of apps,” he said.
ARIN and other advocates for migrating to IPv6 are battling the cynicism of those who heard the cry of the wolf a few years ago and the issue may still be exaggerated. “But the registries weren’t saying it back then. They are now,” he said.
To read the full, in-depth article on our sister site, Billing & OSS World, click here or on the source link below.
