Brian Wolfe, Partner for Managed and Support Services at Laurus Technologies, recently had the following to say about IPV4 address space and the transition to IPV6:
The Problem
The current version of the Internet Protocol, that most people are familiar with from setting up their home wireless networks, uses a dotted decimal addressing notation for specifying IP addresses such as 192.168.1.10. This version of the Internet protocol, which many people may not realize is actually Internet Protocol version 4 (or IPV4) has served us well for about 30 years, but we are now approximately 18 months away from running out of IPV4 addresses. We’ve always known that this would happen and there was a lot of emphasis in the 1990’s to extend the life of the IPV4 address space by using “private addresses” on internal networks for systems that did not need to be publicly accessible. Network Address Translation (NAT) technology was developed in the 1990’s to hide large amounts of privately addressed devices behind a small number of public addresses. Today most firewalls, routers, and even home-office wireless access points include NAT technology to support IPV4 address conservation.
The Number Resource Organization (NRO), which is made up of the five Regional Internet Registries which allocate IPV4 addressing blocks to service providers, just announced that we have now used up 92% of the IPV4 address space.
The Good News: There is a Solution…
The good news is that the industry has known this was going to happen for more than almost two decades and there is a solution to IPV4 exhaustion. As the IPV4 address space runs out, and it is projected to be exhausted in 18 months by the end of 2011, carriers such as Verizon, Comcast, and NTT plan on allocating IP addresses based on the newer IP version 6 (IPV6) for their customers. IPV6 has a much larger address space because it uses 128-bit addresses rather than the 32 bit addresses used by IPV4. The latest versions of most operating systems and network equipment have the ability to support IPV6. A few of the largest web site operators have begun to implement IPV6 infrastructure for their web sites so users will be able to easily access them via IPV6.
The NRO has been urging governments world-wide to take action before the IPV4 address space runs out. The federal government has pushed its suppliers to provide IPV6 technology by requiring all of its router purchases support IPV6 since 2008 and all current IT systems purchases must support IPV6.
The Bad News: No one Seems to be Aware of the Problem or the Solution…
Unfortunately fewer than 0.1% of US users have implemented IPV6 and fewer than 1.5% of the top 1000 web sites have adopted IPV6 so we have a lot of work to do to make the transition to IPV6 work smoothly over the next 12-18 months. The service providers will use gateways and address translators to help their IPV6 customers access the “old Internet” IPV4-based sites. Some of the challenges that will be involved with this will be bottlenecks and potential application and QOS issues. If you have done a technology refresh on your networking infrastructure in the past two years you will probably not need to replace any hardware, but there will be some work that needs to be done related to planning and implementation for IPV6 as well as training because IPV6 is a bit more complex than IPv4. If you have some older network equipment or you are running older versions of software you will want to evaluate your options.
Now is a good time to engage with your Network Integrator/Consultant to put a plan and a budget together for implementing IPV6 in 2010 or early 2011 so you are prepared for the transition.
