Sound the death knell for IPv4
- 05 April, 2011 14:07
- Comments 6
Internode's John Lindsay
2011 marks the death of Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) but companies and ISPs are largely yet to deploy its successor, IPv6. James Hutchinson looks at the state of the market and what is holding the new protocol back.
The apocalypse is here; the 4.3 billion unique client addresses once made available by Vinton Cerf and the founders of the internet in 1977 are rapidly disappearing.
At time of writing, the global internet registry, Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, is depleting its last allocation of IPv4 addresses with final stock expected to go by February.
Asia Pacific regional internet registry APNIC is the next victim. Its cache of 32 million remaining addresses will be halved by August. Proposed policy indicates the final 16 million addresses will be selectively distributed only to member organisations which have a “viable IPv6 deployment strategy”; a last-ditch measure to delay the death of a standard the world has outgrown.
Much of this growth has been attributed to China and South Korea, two of the fastest growing internet economies. Australia isn’t far behind though; with 9.6 million addresses distributed in 2010, it ranks fifth in speed, due to the influx of iPhones, iPads and competing mobile devices.
Each new device requires a unique address to access the internet, and there is simply not enough to go around.
Yet, none of this is particularly new. IPv4 address exhaustion was first identified in the 1980s and a task force established in 1990 was tasked with discovering a fix. The protocol’s alternative and ultimate successor, IPv6, has been available for adoption since 1998.
But just under 13 years later, APNIC research indicates that only four per cent of end-user client devices surveyed in recent months would use IPv6 if forced by a compatible website or server. In a dual stack environment — where both IPv4 and IPv6 are available — only some 0.2 per cent of those devices would opt for the newer, and most current, protocol.
So why has no one made the switch?
Next: Beating the flood
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Comments
Michael
a) IPv4 works, and will continue to do so long after addresses are exhausted for two reasons: firstly, there are a huge number of allocated addresses which aren't actually in use at all, and secondly, 3G networks in particular already use internal IPs all over the place in preparation - all that will happen is that this practice becomes more prevalent, and as we can see it is working fine.
b) IPv6 is inevitable as it's water under the bridge now, but nobody is in a hurry because as well as expanding the address pool, IPv6 decided to throw in the garbage everything that IPv4 has going for it. Human readability? Forget it. Efficient use of addresses? Forget it. All we get is a crapload of hard to read, hard to work with addresses that no sysadmin wants to touch, but apparently this is all ok because there's more IP addresses now than there are MAC addresses. (This makes NO SENSE - now we just have to wait for the MAC addrs to run out..)
Darius
> "... the influx of iPhones, iPads and competing mobile devices.
>
> Each new device requires a unique address to access the internet, > and there is simply not enough to go around."
Are you implying that each new device requires a unique WAN address, before it can access the Internet?
von Saiko
@Michael
a) ipv4 and NAT solution just keeps adding problems regarding ever more present VoIP. NAT is an abomination created out of sheer urgency and should have never been created in the first place. For NAT to exist and function to a certain degree a sh*tload of additional protocols are needed to avoid manual config (UPnP, STUN). Not to mention how many issues there are with traffic managing/balancing when NAT is in place.
It's just time to move over...
b) human readability? ever heard of DNS?
j/k... indeed it's a bit more complicated for an admin to read (for common people it'll be the same as it was with v4). The thing is now with v6 you'd have more space to manage and plan the whole network. So if you plan everything in advanced v6 could be even easier to configure.
about the MAC addresses... indeed at first it seems illogical that there would be less MAC address space then IP addr space. But if you know how networking works you'd know MAC addresses are relevant only for one LAN segment. The future lack of MAC addresses isn't a problem for networking at all - it's a problem only for hardware vendors since there's a possibility you could (hypothetically) end up with two devices with the same MAC. Even when that happens that will be on two opposite sides of the world....
@Darius the whole internet is based on the idea each device is uniquely identified by it's IP address. So yes each device SHOULD have it's own IP. Once IPv6 is implemented you REALLY wouldn't worry about how efficient that would.
Darius
" ... NAT is an abomination ... "
"@Darius the whole internet is based on the idea each device is uniquely identified by it's (sic) IP address. So yes each device SHOULD have it's (sic) own IP."
@von Saiko -- NAT is a layer of abstraction that won't go away just because there are zillions of WAN addresses available. There will still be situations where it is desirable to have multiple devices/hosts sharing a single address. There will also be situations where it is better that a device/host cannot be addressed directly by other WAN devices/hosts but still have access to the WAN (an arrangement sometimes referred to as a LAN or private network)
Meh
Most homes, businesses and government agencies run private IP networks internally with NAT handling oubound connections. Their servers most often have Internet IP addresses, and we're a long way of having too many servers for IPv4.
Sebby
People who prefer to remain ignorant and/or fearful about IPv6 and who therefore do not deploy it for a number of silly, technically unsubstantiated reasons (some of which are above) have every right to be dragged kicking and screaming, or resist at their own expense. It is their choice. Choice is good. Nobody can argue with that. Personally, I'd rather reconcile myself to the next-generation Internet into which we are all marching, and think it's about time I gave up defending my choice to people who clearly don't share my view. They are lost now.
Cheers,
Sabahattin
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