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.
“But the only real driver that will get people moving on this, unfortunately, is full IPv4 address depletion,” Jimmerson said. “And that smart grid? It can’t happen without IPv6.”
This is not an end-user issue. Most newer Internet-enabled devices are already IPv6 compatible. The problem is most network operators believe they are as well. But all it takes, Jimmerson said, is one network element that is not compliant to bring traffic routing to a halt.
“And if people wait too long, they will end up rushing their migration and that can get expensive,” Jimmerson said.
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.
