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The Impending IP Crisis
Factomatic writes "With the supply of IP addresses expected to run out by 2005 due to the popularity explosion of the Internet and the expectation that everything from your phone to your washing machine will soon have its own IP address, Alex Lightman, CEO of Charmed Technology and chairman of last month's North American IPv6 Global Summit tells the New York Times "we're going to need something like 100 IP addresses for each human being." IPv6 will increase the supply of addresses from 4 billion today to a number in excess of 35 trillion that is "so big that there's not a word for the number," says Cody Christman, director of product engineering for Verio, which offers IPv6 in San Francisco, Washington and elsewhere. The article is a good layman's backgrounder on the looming IP crisis."
unless a new prognostication that 'the end is nigh, in 2005' passes as news. everyone knows it's gonna happen. just as we all know that with NAT and proxies, most of it can be safely delayed by tech companies until they have an outside fiscal force to upgrade.
and i doubt my fridge will have an IP address anytime -before- ipv6 starts to be rolled out en masse.
as with all pure tech - it needs that killer app. something needs to come out that is so fantastically great that everyone has to have it - and it needs to require ipv6. until then - at best we'll be going dual-mode.
good luck finding that app, and educating users what it is, and what it does.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
I want to see IP as more of a general resource like electricity or water. You just plug anything into your wires/pipes, and it gets full access to the resource. Want more things getting water such as a washing machine? Then just run another pipe to it and it's got access. The current hacks of NAT are equivalent to only being allowed to install one tap in your house, and "proxying" the rest with buckets. Why cant it be like a water or electricity supply?
Those saying 'we have plenty of space left' obviously dont realise that the reason for this is that the current allocation policies for IPv4 make it impossible to get space for arbitrary devices. Yes, if you only allocate one IP address per gateway, of course you wont run out for a while. But that then mandates the use of ugly hacks such as NAT. A single tap per house/organisation.
To make full use of the potential of the net, one must be able to freely allocate IP addresses to any devices that want them, no matter how trivial it may seem today. Back when IP was invented, it was never in anyones wildest dreams that there would be an address shortage. There were barely a hundred hosts yet 32 bits of space. Look at what's happened in 20-odd years!
Lets not make the same mistake today.
Sparks:Gadget:Beer Maker
Because your other devices will want to keep their identity even when not at home. Imagine having an IP-based telephone as a (slightly contrived) example. You want to be able to route to it no matter what network it resides on at the moment.
I use my laptop in a number of places; home and at the department is the most common places but also others. Moving from place to place is a bit of a pain, though - I need to get a new IP address, change the SMTP server and so on, and setting up other stuff so I am allowed to access it no matter where I am is painful and error prone. If my laptop could keep its identity irrepsectively of where it is physically located on the net it would simplify life a whole lot for me.
NAT works pretty well for the stuff we do today, but it precludes a lot of interesting uses, and is actually quite painful compared to the possible alternative.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
No, we should withdraw all the A-class networks that are unnecessarily allocated to US companies.
OTH - I'd rather move to IPv6.
it's in my head
Backbones are already upgrading to IPv6 enabled software and hardware. My employer has plans to run dual-stack IPv4 IPv6 later this year which means that any existing IPv4 customer can give us a call saying "enable v6" and we can do it that day. (assuming they have their hardware/software in place). No tunneling, no 6to4 gateways, it'll just work. I see no long-term viability of the 6to4 gateways, in the same way that we didn't see caches go mainstream for every internet user. (yeah yeah, some of you will claim bittorrent is a large distributed cache, and while that might be the case, i'm talking about for most of the general public, the AOL/IE users that don't know how to spell IP).
If you also see one of my previous comments on IPv6 here about who is supporting it (note, what you might define as a backbone isn't what the rest of the network might..) and has existing routes in the tables, you'll get an idea of who is at least prepared for the new future of impossible to read ip addresses.
If everyone runs dual-stack v4v6, you'll see the ability to access your existing services while continuing to be able to gain access to the IPv6 content. Personally, I've seen that in cases like where a RedHat release comes out, I can get faster transfer rates going to the IPv6 mirror than the IPv4 mirror. Everyone is hammering the v4, which makes the v6 available for me :). I'm just waiting for Linksys (now cisco) and the other consumer product people to realize that they need to upgrade their devices so they can do IPv6 nat for those cablemodem routers, etc..
Here's where I think that the local loop (dsl, cable) providers can go and start to seriously make money and make IPv6 viable: IPv6 enable your network, then offer VoIP services over SIP enabled devices. This way you don't run out of numbering space (ip and pstn). (Trivia: how many ips would it take to convert the existing PSTN network to VoIP, if each phone number required an IP address).
Of course we'll run out of IPv6 addresses.
... but surely something will be invented that calls for more addresses.
Not right away
For example, teleportation might require separate addressing for all possible energy states of all elementary particles in the teleported object.
Don't say it can't happen. Remember when 64k was all the memory anyone would ever need? and a megabyte hard drive was out of your price range?
-kgj