We have passed a milestone in the history of the Internet; On Thursday 3rd February 2011, it was announced that the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), who maintains the Internet’s reserves of unassigned IP addresses, has distributed the final blocks of IPv4 addresses to the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs). The RIRs based across North America, Europe, Asia, South America, and Africa will allocate them to service providers and enterprises worldwide. All of the IPv4 addresses will then be in use!
APNIC, which provides internet addressing services to the Asia Pacific region, received two /8s (33 million addresses) on Tuesday in a move that triggered the immediate distribution of the last five /8s to Regional Internet Registries. ISPs and businesses are rapidly burning through any IPv4 addresses APNIC makes available, so organisations in the region are expected to be among the first to feel the effects of IPv4 exhaustion.
What is the problem?
In many ways (like Y2K) this is a non-event, that was forseen and required some change requirement, but was ignored until the last minute.
No network, application or activity that depends on IPv4 today will stop working, but the change to IPv6 is the next step in a vast and inevitable change.
In the not-so-distant future the RIRs will no longer have unassigned IPv4 addresses to distribute. The ability to attach new devices and networks to the Internet will depend on transferring IPv4 addresses from someone else who doesn’t need them, connecting with IPv6, or using some set of “transition” or “co-existence” technologies allowing IPv4 and IPv6 connected devices to talk to each other (‘Dual Stack’). All of these short term patches may help, but the future of the internet will become a network built on IPv6.
What does this mean for the Internet?
The deployment of IPv6 promises a vastly larger, richer Internet of more devices and more ways for them to interact. The exhaustion of IPv4 has long been predicted but has remained a distant prospect until recently thanks to the use of Network Address Translation (NAT) technology, which meant banks of corporate PCs all sat behind small ranges of IP addresses.
IPv4
Since 1981, IPv4 has been the publicly used version of the Internet Protocol, and it is currently the foundation for most Internet communications. IPv4 addresses may simply be written in any notation expressing a 32-bit integer value, but for human convenience, they are most often written in dot-decimal notation, which consists of the four octets of the address expressed separately in decimal and separated by periods.
Notation Value Conversion from dot-decimal
Dot-decimal 192.0.2.235 N/A
Decimal 3221226219 The 32-bit number expressed in decimal
Octal 030000001353 The 32-bit number expressed in octal
IPv6
IPv6 was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to deal with the long-anticipated IPv4 address exhaustion, and is described in Internet standard document RFC 2460, published in December 1998. The length of an IPv6 address is 128 bits, compared to 32 bits in IPv4.
IPv6 offers a vastly expanded address space but even though it’s been around for a decade it remains unsupported on many networks. That needs to change or else the interweb will become fragmented in the 21st century equivalent of a canals and railways transport system
IPv6 addresses have two logical parts: a 64-bit network prefix, and a 64-bit host address part. (The host address is often automatically generated from the interface MAC address.[32]) An IPv6 address is represented by 8 groups of 16-bit hexadecimal values separated by colons (:) shown as follows:
A typical example of an IPv6 address is
2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334
The hexadecimal digits are case-insensitive.
The 128-bit IPv6 address can be abbreviated with the following rules:
Rule one: Leading zeroes within a 16-bit value may be omitted. For example, the address fe80:0000:0000:0000:0202:b3ff:fe1e:8329 may be written as fe80:0:0:0:202:b3ff:fe1e:8329
Rule two: A single occurrence of consecutive groups of zeroes within an address may be replaced by a double colon. For example, fe80:0:0:0:202:b3ff:fe1e:8329 becomes fe80::202:b3ff:fe1e:8329
The Address policy at the RIRs has been getting ever more conservative for a decade, but the limit has now been reached. Even the policy evolution that has allowed the RIRs to permit direct address transfers between members once the unallocated pool has been exhausted (allowing the development of a market in address space) can’t put off the need forever for a larger pool of numbers than IPv4 can provide.
IPv4 protocol that has been the foundation for the Internet, the transition to IPv6 will provide an address space for the Internet of the future.
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