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Journal: IPv4 to IPv6 Upgrade

A graph showing he declining availability of IP numbers.¹

The press has finally noticed a phenomenon known as IPv4 Address-space exhaustion, and are running about like headless chickens in that way that only the press can. The sky is not falling.

IP (Internet Protocol) version 4 was created in 1981 and has been in use on the public internet ever since. IP relies on so-called IP numbers or IP addresses which are semi-geographical routing numbers used to transmit "packets" of data across the inter-networked system.

Unfortunately, the addressing system used by IPv4 did not take into account the massive, commercial expansion of the Internet, that address-assignment would be conducted inefficiently, virtualization of hosts, a certain technical limitation of SSL or the possibility that mobile devices, appliances and individual scientific instruments (etc) could connect to the Internet. As a result the available ranges of IP numbers are very nearly depleted and if current trends continue will exhausted completely by September 2011 at latest.

Numerous stop-gap measures and technological complexifications have been used to forestall the problem but such measures can only delay exhaustion. The only solution is to migrate to a new and much improved addressing system, IPv6 (version 5 was abandoned while still in the experimental phase).

IPv6 solves this problem by offering a massively greater addressing space. Whereas IPv4 used 32-bit addressing, (yielding about 2³² - exactly 4,294,967,296 addresses) IPv6 uses 128-bit addressing (yielding 2¹²⁸ - about 34,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 addresses), by comparison there are thought to be 6.8 billion people on earth at time of writing, according to the world bank. This leads to the conclusion that more than 2⁹² addresses per person worldwide. This is the same number of addresses per person as the number of atoms in a metric ton of carbon.

IPv6 will last so long that by the time we need to replace it the Internet will no longer recognizably exist. This is also not something that you need to worry about, only internet companies need to worry about this. There is a very small chance that router equipment, etc will need to be reprogrammed or replaced but this is a minor issue.

Notes

¹ Image Credit, 'MRO' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ipv4-exhaust.svg

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