Today IANA has allocated the 5 last remaining IPv4 address blocks to the 5 regional registries. The global pool of unused internet addresses has been exhausted. What remains is two or three levels of buffers between that and the end-user. The first level are those regional registries, but they are projected to burn through their stock in somewhere between 3 and 6 months. After that, there’s a buffer with the various internet access providers. They were, under the current policy, allowed to request IP-addresses for a projected use up to 2 years. So if they play their cards right, they may have leeway for up to 2.5 years from now. But it’s not a matter of who holds out the longest, it’s a matter of who runs out first. Because as soon as someone does, there will be, out of necessity, computers and servers on the internet that can only talk IPv6. So if you, even though you’re secure with your existing IPv4 allocation, want to talk to those machines, you will need to have IPv6 as well, or some form of translation in between. The first IPv6-only machines will probably come online in the Asia/Pacific area, where growth of the number of internet-connected machines is the largest. Whether this immediately impacts you or not depends on who you talk to and/or do business with. But it won’t be much longer before the other regions of the world will have to follow suit. If you want to continue to enjoy an open internet where you can talk to anyone and get information from anywhere, then you are going to need IPv6 connectivity. And that’s where the silver lining to this global problem appears.
See, the internet was built as a open, single tiered network, where everyone could talk to everyone else if they wanted to. We call it the end-to-end principle. In recent times this has more often been talked about as ‘peer to peer’ (p2p), but it encompasses much more than just being able to share files. The fact that nowadays the term ‘p2p’ is used for a few particular activities, rather than all the rest, indicates that the times have changed. Most of our internet use has changed from an end-to-end model to a client-server model, or a ‘content provider’ and ‘content consumer’ model. While this has brought us a number of great services, such as YouTube, webmail and social networks, it has also made us heavily dependent on a small number of commercial entities, with our privacy most precariously at stake. The upcoming shortage of IP-addresses, which has been foreseen for decades, has only made this worse. To save addresses, every house and most businesses are issued only 1 IP-address. Some clever tricks were devised to allow you to connect more than one computer in your house, but because you have only one address that can be reached from elsewhere on the internet, it’s impossible to make end-to-end connections between any combination of computers connected that way. In other words, you are dependant on central servers, and as such often dependant on a third party, to get in contact with those other people hidden away behind their single address.
And that’s where the new IP-protocol IPv6 comes in. It gives us so ridiculously many addresses that there really is no reason conceivable to give you only one address. Due to the way the protocol works, you will be given *at least* 2^64 addresses to use at home. If you want to have multiple separate networks at home, which in the future you very probably will, then you should be given 2^72 addresses (65536 networks of 2^64 addresses) or even 2^80. My preference would be the latter, because it’s basically the one-size-fits-all approach. No matter whether you are a large corporation or a lowly home user, everyone will get the same size of address-range. It’ll certainly make administration a lot easier, and it will support incremental growth.
So there it is. IPv4 is dead, long live IPv6! And hurray for the return of end-to-end, barrier-free internet for everyone!