IPv6 - The boy who cried wolf…

Posted by: Michael Disabato

ARIN and the other registries have been claiming for years that we are going to run out of IPv4 addresses. Unfortunately, their predictions were either so far into the future as to be dismissed, or readjusted because of technological advances (CDIR is one). However, late next year, that all changes as the wolf actually arrives.

I’ve been watching the predictions for the last six or seven years, and the one fault I’ve seen is not accounting for the acceleration effect of technologies, such as mobility. As a result, while ARIN claims the last block of IPv4 addresses will be given to an ISP late in 2011, I think it will be a year earlier than that. No matter. As has been said, “The jig is up.”

Assume you can’t get a block of IPv4 addresses in 3 years. What do you do? By then I hope you have done all the following:

• Enable your Internet services (web, mail, etc.) to be IPv6 and IPv4. Make sure you can safely communicate with both Internet islands.
• Begin testing IPv6 on your laptops. Even if you never adopt it internally, IPv6 will one day be required for hotspot access as ISPs run out of IPv4 addresses.
• Check your Microsoft Server 2008 implementations. They are already using link-local IPv6 addresses for background communications.
• Plan for migration to IPv6, but wait until the business case arrives (if it ever does).

Eventually, the Internet will bifurcate into IPv4 and IPv6 islands. You need to be ready to communicate with both. Further, there will come a time when you simply cannot access the Internet without an IPv6 address on your machine, and that will have security as well as connectivity issues.

Start planning now. IPv6 is imminent. And this time, we mean it.

Michael

Comments

[Tom Zeller]

We started with about 3.7 billion addresses and now have about 430 million left, or about 10%. There are 26 /8's left and the last two years about 9 or 10 were handed out each year. Detailed stats available at https://www.arin.net/knowledge/statistics/index.html (for North America) and http://iana.net/numbers/ (globally).