Subscribe to RSSIPv4 Warehouse Officially Emptied, IPv6 Adoption Becoming Urgent
The last allocation of IPv4 addresses from the central pool to Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) occurred Thursday in a symbolic ceremony hosted by ICANN in Miami along with the Number Resources Organization (NRO), the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) and the Internet Society.
The allocation of the remaining five blocks of IPv4 addresses were allocated to the five RIRs.
The allocation of the final IPv4 addresses is analogous to the last crates of a product leaving a manufacturing warehouse and going to the regional stores or distributions centres, where they can still be distributed to the public. Once they are gone, the supply is exhausted. In this case, the RIRs will distribute the last IPv4 addresses to Internet Service Providers, universities, governments, telecommunications companies and other enterprises.
“It’s only a matter of time before the RIRs and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) must start denying requests for IPv4 address space,” said Raúl Echeberría, Chairman of the Number Resource Organization, the umbrella organization of the five RIRs. “Deploying IPv6 is now a requirement, not an option.”
“This is a major turning point in the on-going development of the Internet,” said Rod Beckstrom, ICANN’s President and Chief Executive Officer. “No one was caught off guard by this. The Internet technical community has been planning for IPv4 depletion for some time. But it means the adoption of IPv6 is now of paramount importance, since it will allow the Internet to continue its amazing growth and foster the global innovation we’ve all come to expect.”
The new Internet protocol, IPv6, will open up a pool of Internet addresses that is a billion-trillion times larger than the total pool of IPv4 addresses (about 4.3 billion), which means the number of IPv6 addresses is virtually inexhaustible for the foreseeable future.
The move to IPv6 has been slower than hoped, with many organisations such as internet service providers reluctant to adopt the new protocol due to the cost.
“IPv6 addresses were designed as the solution to the predicted shortage of IPv4 addresses, but as an industry, it has been easier to extend usage of IPv4 rather than undergo the challenge of transitioning to IPv6,” Ovum’s senior consultant Craig Skinner told ZDNet.
Technologies such as dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) and network address translators (NATs), which allow for sharing of public IP addresses within a pool of users, have helped in prolonging IPv4′s longevity, Skinner said.
Two “blocks” of the dwindling number of IPv4 addresses, about 33 million of them, were allocated earlier this week to the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) for the Asia Pacific region. When that happened, it meant the pool of IPv4 addresses had been depleted to a point where a global policy was triggered to immediately allocate the remaining small pool of addresses equally among the five global Regional Internet Registries.
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