When I was working towards my Masters Degree I wrote a long paper all about how Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4), the current version then and now , was rapidly running out of addresses. I hysterically decreed that the Internet, as we know it, would collapse within two years if the motley crew of internet governance bodies could not get their act together and produce a migration plan to get everyone to Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), the savior.  (By the way, if you are wondering,  work on IPv5, an evolutionary vice revolutionary modification to the Internet Protocol was stopped when it became obvious that only radical, emergent action could save us.) IPv6

See the basic problem was that the addressing scheme in version 4, while seeming huge when it was created, had become nearly saturated by the mid-nineties.  If you ran out of addresses, you would run out of new places for machines to connect, and the growth of the internet would stop.  No more new users, companies, or web servers! Lions and Tigers and Bears – Oh my!   So here we are twelve years later, and not only has the Internet not ground to a halt under IPv4, but the number of individual devices connecting via an IP address is about a million times larger than it was way back then.

At least, I was not alone in my hysteria. This excerpt from Wikipedia sums up the great march to the right of the supposed end of  the IPv4 address space.

"Estimates of the time frame until complete exhaustion of IPv4 addresses used to vary widely. In 2003, Paul Wilson (director of APNIC) stated that, based on then-current rates of deployment, the available space would last until 2023. In September 2005 a report by Cisco Systems (a network hardware manufacturer) suggested that the pool of available addresses would dry up in as little as 4 to 5 years. As of November 2007, a daily updated report projected that the IANA pool of unallocated addresses would be exhausted in May 2010, with the various Regional Internet Registries using up their allocations from IANA in April 2011. There is now consensus among Regional Internet Registries that final milestones of the exhaustion process will be passed in 2010 or 2011 at the latest, and a policy process has started for the end-game and post-exhaustion era."  Wikipedia

Here are some other great background links to get you up to speed on the current state of the IPv6 issue:

  1. IPv6 – Wikipedia
  2. The IPv6 Portal

So there were always two basic issues involved: hardware and software.  If your hardware was not compatible with the version 6 addressing scheme then it would become useless unless a suitable, backwards compatible implementation plan could  be established through agreement of all parties.

Now, I don’t intend to make lite of the difficulty that was envisioned in moving the entire Internet infrastructure from version 4 to 6 way back when.  I am just trying to say that, today, unless you are responsible for a large number of legacy machines or applications – there is nothing to worry about… nothing at all.

What changed in the past decade then to make this transition non-threatening?

In the hardware space two big factors changed.  First, the average life of an internet device is less than five years.  Thus, as new hardware that was IPv6 compliant replaced legacy gear, the number of problem systems was dramatically reduced.  Today, there is less than 12% of the equipment on the net that  was there in 1995.  Second, hardware manufacturers moved from erasable/re-programmable microchips to ones that were flash upgradeable by end users.  Hence, today, nearly every system that was not built for IPv6 can be upgraded to be so.

I think that Slashdot.org ’s recent article about what it took to get Google compliant is all that needs be said about the ease of achieving IPv6 compliance on the software side these days. "Google engineers say it was not expensive and required only a small team of developers to enable all of the company’s applications to support IPv6" Read the whole story at Slashdot.org: Google Engineers Say IPv6 Is Easy, Not Expensive .

I believe that every profession needs its cautionary, ghost, and fairy tales.  I am pretty sure that us Information Professionals have found our first!  It even happens to be all three-in-one!  The Internet did not get strangled by the limits of IPv4!

Do you think that we will make it to IPv6 without incident or am I being overly optimistic?

That is my Information Technology Thought of the Day (ITTOD) for April 6, 2009 ©Scott Coughlin.