IPv4 Internet address exhaustion moves a step closer

IPv6 is the only viable option for the Internet's future and the pending milestone in the ARIN region is yet another strong signal that the future is almost here.

A significant Internet milestone will be reached in the next few weeks when ARIN, the Regional Internet Registry for the USA, Canada and several Caribbean Islands, exhausts its supply of available IPv4 addresses.

I'm sure there will be many who read that sentence and wonder "why is that important?" Let me explain.
Internet Protocol addresses, or IP addresses, are essential to the operation of the Internet. Every device needs an IP address in order to connect to the Internet, and to then communicate with other devices, computers, and services. Without IP addresses, there is no Internet as we know it. IPv4 is Version 4 of the Internet Protocol in use today.

The problem we have is that we have almost run out of these IPv4 addresses. At any moment in the next few weeks, ARIN will join three other regions (Asia Pacific, Europe & the Middle East, and Latin America & the Caribbean) in exhausting its available supply of IPv4 addresses. Only Africa has a reasonable supply left.
While this milestone has been inevitable, it is still a significant moment for the ever-growing, address-hungry Internet. IPv4 address scarcity is now a very real issue worldwide, and psychologically, the fact that America - the birthplace of the Internet - has now effectively run out of IPv4 addresses will make this issue very real in the minds of the Internet community globally.

Meanwhile, the Internet keeps on growing, and the demand for Internet addresses will only continue to grow.
An estimated 40 per cent of the world's population currently has Internet access, and this is predicted to rise to 50 per cent by 2017. At the same time, the number of devices connected to the Internet will grow massively, as mobile broadband and the 'Internet of Things' become a reality. Around 50 billion devices will be connected to the Internet by 2020. That's about 25 billion more than are connected right now, relative to the total IPv4 address pool size of 4 billion addresses (most of which has been allocated).

However, the impending milestone does not mean the Internet will stop working, nor stop growing. What it does mean is that Internet businesses globally need to move to the next generation of Internet addressing: IPv6.

IPv6: The future

IPv6 is the next generation IP addressing system that was created in the 1990s in response to the clear need for a greater number of Internet addresses than IPv4 could offer. The theoretical IPv6 address pool size is an incredibly large 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses.

The need to move to IPv6 has been known for years but many organizations have opted to defer the investment until really necessary. IPv6 usage has been increasing steadily in recent years: last year IPv6 traffic doubled from 2.5 per cent to 5 per cent as measured by Google, and is currently around 6.5 per cent and rising.

Big telecommunication companies, Internet Service Providers and content providers in the US have been moving to IPv6 - Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner Cable, Verizon, Facebook, and Google among them. The Asia Pacific region and the rest of the world has also been adopting IPv6, albeit unevenly.

As IPv4 addresses continue to become more scarce, we can expect IPv6 adoption to keep following its current growth trajectory, and hopefully accelerate.

The good news is the costs associated with moving to IPv6 can be minimized by planning ahead - for instance, by ensuring IPv6 capabilities are gained within the normal hardware and software upgrade cycles.

The IPv4 transfer market

However, the complete transition to IPv6 will take many years, and in the meantime, IPv4 address space is still critically important to many Internet Service Providers and network operators.
There are some organizations who have more IPv4 addresses than they need, and some are willing to transfer addresses to other organizations who have a need (often with a private financial arrangement).
This global "market" for IPv4 transfers already exists and is becoming more active. In the Asia Pacific, the number of market transfers in the APNIC region in 2014 increased by 68% (98 in 2013, 165 in 2014). In the US, Amazon acquired 4 million IPv4 addresses from DuPont in January. In the UK, the government's Department of Work and Pensions has just transferred 150,000 IPv4 addresses to Norwegian ISP, Altibox, for a reported 600,000 UK Pounds (around $1.19 million AUD).

The transfer market is an important mechanism for organizations which need to get IPv4 addresses but can't get them from their Internet registry (due to exhaustion). However, the transfer market is not the cure to IPv4 scarcity. Even optimistically, the total amount of unused or under-used IPv4 address space that could be made available only represents a stop gap measure in the life of the IPv4 Internet.

As IPv6 is deployed in more and more networks, as products and expertise become more available and cheaper, the cost of IPv4 addresses should be carefully assessed. IPv4 address transfer brokers report addresses changing hands right now for around $7 - $13 USD per address, and as scarcity bites, prices may change. Constantly going back to the transfer market may become a very costly exercise, particularly as a temporary measure which only defers the inevitable need for IPv6.

If your company depends on the Internet, then it will depend on IPv6 as a critical part of its future. Now is the time to be asking those who provide you with Internet services and expertise - whether they are ISPs, technology vendors, data centres, developers, staff, or consultants - how they will support IPv6 in future?
IPv6 is the only viable option for the Internet's future and the pending milestone in the ARIN region is yet another strong signal that the future is almost here.

Source : abc