IPv4 Will Not Die In 2010 264
darthcamaro writes "A couple of years ago, the big shots at IANA (that's the people that handle internet addressing) issued a release stating that the IPv4 address space was likely to be gone by 2010. Here we are in 2010 and guess what, IPv4 with its 4.3 billion addresses will NOT be all used up this year. In fact there could be another two years worth of addresses still left at this point. 'We're at about 10.2 percent (IPv4 address space) remaining globally,' John Curran, president and CEO of ARIN said. 'At our current trend rate we've got about 625 days before we will not have new IPv4 addresses available. We're still handling IPv4 requests from ISPs, hosting companies and large users for IPv4 address space, but that's a very short time period.'"
Re:Panic Averted - Resume Doing Nothing (Score:4, Interesting)
Worse than that, we'll continue to deal with the issues NAT causes, and I'm sure the various money grubbing ISP's will charge even more for additional IPs as we run out.
Could last another 10 years... (Score:1, Interesting)
...if we actually went after those who currently hold "monster" /8 and even /16 blocks that aren't doing squat (pun intended) with them.
I found my college campus computer lab has all of their workstations on the live Internet. No shit. Turned off the XP firewall and I'm pinging it. Props for them actually USING part of the monster /16 block they're assigned, but damn, talk about a Security nightmare...
Whats the point? A three year old estimate is off (Score:3, Interesting)
Big F...ing deal! How many predictions are accurate for three or more years? The original prediction was made in May, 2007 and current prediction has slipped the date from December 2, 2010 to November 18, 2012 not quite a 2 years. I challenge anyone to find accurate predictions that are 3 1/2 years old.
We need to be moving to IPV6 as quickly as possible. We may have a bit longer than was predicted 3 1/2 years ago. The thing that is scary is have we made much progress in moving to IPV6 in the last 3 1/2 year? I think not much. So, whatever the actual exhaustion dates are for IPV4 address. We can be certain that we are 3 1/2 years closer than we were and we have done almost nothing to prepare.
The adaptation of IPv6 will free IPv4 addresses (Score:5, Interesting)
I predict that 2012 we will still have available IPv4 addresses.
This will happen because some IPv4 addresses will be reallocated as client-side doesn't need IPv4 addresses in IPv6 to access IPv4 resources. So IPv6 adaptation it self will slow the need to migrate to IPv6 as singular Internet Protocol.
Re:Trends (625 days vs 1.5 years +/- 3 mo) (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:2012 (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes there are a lot of ipv6 addresses, however looking at the total size of a 128 bit address space is very misleading as ipv6 addresses are designed to be allocated in a more heirachical manner and designed to support stateless autoconfiguration for clients. Originally end sites were meant to be allocated a /48 though ripe now seems to be pushing for smaller allocations to smaller end sites.
Plus only 2::/3 is assigned to the ipv6 internet with other address space being reserved for other purposes.
Those figures would give us 2^45 end sites, this should be enough that we don't run out of addresses any time soon but it's a lot less than the ammount people assume from just looking at the number of bits in the IP.
I foresee a temporary solution. (Score:4, Interesting)
One that I came up would be to offer a financial incentive to reclaim unused blocks of addresses. Ten or fifteen years ago, IP address space was handed out like candy. You could get a class C block readily, and class B blocks just needed a little justification. I did some contract work in the late 90s for a company that I still keep up with, and they have a few entire C nets in their possession and not in use. Now how do we get these back? There is going to be demand for IP addresses, and as the supply becomes more and more limited, that demand will make people desperate.
So why not let people who already have address space sell what they have? It does reward unrightfully holding onto stuff, but if these addresses are needed, then hey!
How long until /. is IPv6? (Score:4, Interesting)
Once again, I'll ask a simple question:
How long until it is possible to pull up the main page on Slashdot, using nothing but IPv6 packets?
IMHO, every time one of these "OMFG IPv4 gonna run out RSN!!!1!11!" stores hits the front page, the Slashcrew should have to state where THEY are in becoming IPv6, and what is preventing them from doing so already.
Re:IPv4 doesn't die (Score:4, Interesting)
IP's are given away and there is no reason to give them back so of course there is a lot of demand and we are "running out". But don't think just because IANA runs out of IP's you will be unable to get new ones. They will just come with a price tag. It's a classic land grab, and people that got large chunks of IP space are going to start selling them as soon as there is no free competition.