Are we coming to the end of the Internet?

I picked this up last night from BBC Technology. Naturally the entire world is going virtual more and more each day, but we never thought that every device connected to the internet would require an IP (Internet Protocol). Naturally, there isn’t an infinite number of IP addresses. The horror of running out of IP address would be nasty in this virtual Century.

Currently we use IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4), which is the fourth iteration of the Internet Protocol (IP) and the dominant network layer protocol on the Internet. Problem is, IPv4 uses 32-bit (4-byte) addresses, which limits the address space to 4,294,967,296 possible unique addresses.

You might think that’s a huge number, but around 19 million unique address are reserved for private networks and multicast addresses, which reduces the possible unique addresses that can be assigned to public networks.

At the current pace which the whole world is connecting to the net, from game consoles to mobile phones, it’s inevitable that within the next 3-4 years IPv4 unique addresses will hit Zero. Vint Cerf who is one of the founding fathers of the net (Google’s chief internet evangelist and departing chairman of ICANN), told the BBC in an interview-

There is a risk of not being able to get online….
The rate of consumption of available remaining IPv4 numbers appears to be on track to run out in 2010/11.

So as you can see, the threat is just about to knock our door.

So what’s the solution?

Well off course Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), which is designated as the successor of IPv4 nearly a decade ago, but it hasn’t been rolled out at speed. The primary change from IPv4 to IPv6 is the length of network addresses. IPv6 addresses are 128 bits long, whereas IPv4 addresses are 32 bits; where the IPv4 address space contains roughly 4 billion addresses, IPv6 has enough room for 3.4×1038 unique addresses (let me count- it’s around 335 trillion).

There are misunderstandings regarding IPv4 exhaustion that when IPv4 ran out of addresses the net would stop working, actually the net will still be the same as it is, but if the Internet doesn’t support IPv6, and unable to allocate address to your IPv4 device, you can’t connect to it. In July 2004 ICANN already announced that the root DNS servers for the Internet had been modified to support both IPv6 and IPv4.

So now the hardware manufacturers should build their devices to support IPv6 and ISP’s to be ready for IPv6 as well. The U.S. Government, for example, has specified that the network backbones of all federal agencies must deploy IPv6 by 2008. China has a five year plan to change the whole network infrastructure.

So we’re going see a lot of changes on the Internet as well as devices in the coming years. Is your network IPv6 ready?