Last Days For Central IPv4 Address Pool 376
jibjibjib writes "According to projections by APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Huston, IANA's central IPv4 address pool is expected to run out any day now, leaving the internet with a very limited remaining supply of addresses. APNIC will probably request two /8s (33 million addresses) within the next few weeks. This will leave five /8s available, which will be immediately distributed to the five Regional Internet Registries in accordance with IANA policy. It's expected that APNIC's own address pool will run low during 2011, making ISPs and businesses in the Asia-Pacific region the first to feel the effects of IPv4 exhaustion. The long-term solution to IP address exhaustion is provided by IPv6, the next version of the Internet Protocol. IPv6 has been an internet standard for over a decade, but is still unsupported on many networks and makes up an almost negligible fraction of Internet traffic. Unless ISPs dramatically accelerate the pace of IPv6 deployment, users in some regions will be stuck on IPv4-only connections while ISPs in other regions run out of public IPv4 addresses, leading to a fragmented Internet without the universal connectivity we've previously taken for granted."
Risk aversion (Score:5, Insightful)
Business organizations, like politicians, are usually extraordinarily risk-averse. This touches both in many ways, across many countries. As a result, there won't be any serious pushes into IPv6 until organizations can clearly quantify the damages that will be done from dragging their feet further. Only a small percentage of organizations will fully commit to IPv6 until the guaranteed costs of waiting exceeds the projected costs of moving forward.
Nobody should have expected anything different once the internet became controlled predominantly by public political and private business interests.
We always knew that ipv6 adoption would be messy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:There's no such things as shortages... (Score:4, Insightful)
If so, then people could have been upgrading to IPv6 over the last 10 years as opportunities arose (ie as old equipment needed replacing they'd have replaced with the IPv6 option) and still have been able to see the IPv4 world. As more w/s moved to IPv6 only there would be a compelling reason for more people to follow suit
Once all traffic was using IPv6 there could be an update to free up those first 'n' address for use in IPv6, though there's so many addresses that might not be required for quite some time, so the natural upgrading of equipment would see them made available over the next 5 or 10 years without needing any big splash upgrades.
Or am I completely missing something that would have made this impossible?
Re:How about... (Score:5, Insightful)
At least a good amount of them can be refitted for IPv6 due to installing OpenWRT or DD-WRT or any of the other distributions out there. Maybe it's a business opportunity, flashing home routers to use one of those and reconfigure them to the initial settings afterwards?
Re:Running out! The End! erm, again... (Score:4, Insightful)
If you think NAT and DHCP solve the myriad problems associated with IPv4, you're not qualified to be speaking on the subject.
The Internet is Full (Score:4, Insightful)
OK. We run out of IPv4 addresses. So what? It's not like the 4 billion existing addresses are going to suddenly evaporate. Everything will continue to work just fine, and if you're late to the party, well, it sucks to be you.
Just put up a sign "The Internet is full, go home."
Re:This is going to make us look like imbecils (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:There's no such things as shortages... (Score:5, Insightful)
Problem was it greated more work without benefit.
Of course it did! It's a major infrastructure change! It's not like we were "upgrading the internet" to make it run faster. The entire issue was that our current addressing infrastructure was inadequate. It's like saying, "this road doesn't go to the housing development that they're building up the road - we should make it longer", then complaining that the existing drivers didn't see any benefit. Everyone on the internet right now is fine - it's everyone who's not that this will benefit. So of course it's work without benefit for those of us here now!
Re:Their fault (Score:4, Insightful)
In fact, the opposite will become true soon (once a RIR gets close to exhaustion, i.e. only one /8 block left) in a number of regions: You only get IPv4 addresses if you also take IPv6 addresses.
Re:Time to look at your own desk... (Score:4, Insightful)
I tried tunneling IPv6 for a while but no free tunnel delivers acceptable performance. Must be lonely out there on dialup. When my ISP offers me IPv6 I will use it. Until then it would be stupid. My WISP router is a Mikrotik routerboard so it ought to be easy enough for them to do it if and when THEIR provider, an AT&T reseller, provides them with IPv6.
Re:We always knew that ipv6 adoption would be mess (Score:2, Insightful)
Trillions? I need to see those numbers.
While I agree it's much harder than many people here seem to let on I think you might be too far on the other side.
Not every single device in the world must be switched to IPv6. Only devices that require they be publicly routable might be affected. And even among those. it's not like IPv4 addresses will disappear over night so there's no reason for existing users to necessarily migrate over. This significantly reduces the problem. There's no reason that companies that have vast internal networks on 10.0.0.0/8 need to switch to IPv6. That would be a giant waste of money for them.
Re:We always knew that ipv6 adoption would be mess (Score:2, Insightful)
The cost to switch to IPv6 is not flipping a switch. It will cost trillions upon trillions of dollars globally to migrate.
Whoah there Sally! I can accept the idea that upgrading to IPv6 would be expensive, but.... Trillions? Upon Trillions? That's, eh, 4 Trillion dollars at the minimum.... really? (cough) To give you some idea, the global economy is right now hovering around $74 Trillion per year.
Switching to IPv6 is mostly annoyance factor; Operating Systems have been IPv6 capable for a LONG time. Most routers have also been IPv6 capable for a LONG time. Mostly it's about the human cost of "turning in on" and working out the kinks. It's just a change in protocol. No wires need to be re-run, no servers need to be replaced, and most routers won't even need to be replaced. Even a cheap Cisco 2600 series router can handle IPv6 [dslreports.com] with an O/S upgrade and sufficient RAM! Mostly, it's the owners of cheap-ass consumer routers that will have to actually replace any hardware, and hardware in this market space usually costs less than $100.
I'm in the industry; as a hosting provider this speaks very directly to my needs. And our estimated material cost of switching to IPv6 is something less, probably considerably less, than $500. For a small niche hosting company doing about 1.5 million annually. So why haven't we turned it on? Haven't needed to. The benefit of turning it on is currently negligible. It's not a matter of "dragging our feet", it's more a matter of deciding to go through the annoyance of doing so and getting nothing out of it.