US Shrugs Off World's IP Address Shortage

Clifton Griffin writes "C|Net has an article stating that the U.S. isn't making the push for IPv6 like others are even though the networking appliances and operating systems are ready for it. It goes on to explain that North America has 70% of the Internet address space and that there is a total of 1 billion IPs left, which may sound like a lot but considering we now have Internet-enabled cellphones and VoIP, it really isn't."

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[Ominous Coward]

As much of the world nears an Internet address crunch, North America stands as an island apart, threatening to fragment plans for the biggest overhaul of the Web in decades.

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Global momentum is growing for a new address system, known as IPv6, which promises to vastly expand the pool of unique numbers available for connecting PCs and other devices to the Net. The standard is widely seen as a necessary successor to the current IPv4 system, which some fear could run short of addresses in Asia and Europe within the next few years.

But few analysts expect the problem to affect North America and influential U.S. networks any time soon, thanks to unique conditions that will likely guarantee the region a steady supply of IPv4 addresses for years to come. Since fear of an address shortage is the single biggest argument in favor of a switch, the United States could stay on the sidelines as the rest of the world wrestles with the upgrade over the coming years, networking experts said.

The United States may not see a shortfall because it was granted an enormous number of addresses in the original worldwide allotment.

"Asia hits a problem in two or three years time," said Ovum analyst Iain Stevenson. "You won't see similar problems in other regions for four or five years. And in North America you won't see a problem at all."

The prospects of a costly Internet address overhaul in the United States is in the spotlight following an endorsement of IPv6 last month from the Defense Department. The $30 billion-a-year agency plans to move all its networks to the new Net address standard by 2008, fueling speculation that the switch--already under way in Japan and other parts of the world--may at last be at hand in the United States.

The Defense Department's endorsement could hasten the availability of IPv6 equipment around the world, helping ease expected address squeezes in developing markets such as China and India. But analysts downplayed the DOD plan as a bellwether, noting that the change is motivated primarily by security concerns and not an imminent run on the pool of North American Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, which account for 70 percent of the current 4.3 billion possible addresses.

Doubts about the need for an Internet address upgrade persist despite increasing pressure on companies seeking to build online services in regions with larger populations than the United States but with fewer available IP addresses.

There are now about 1 billion original IP addresses left. While that sounds like plenty, many countries are rapidly draining their allotment from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, raising the specter of a shortfall. Those countries include broadband-saturated Korea; India, which has just 2 million IP addresses; China; and European countries, where Web-enabled phones are used by 70 percent of the population.

Web providers around the world have been procrastinating about switching to the new set of addresses. But reluctance is strongest in North America, where the most compelling argument for the shift is least in evidence. Since the two address systems are compatible, networking experts said, there are no other major issues driving adoption outside of address depletion.

Given the enormity of the overhaul, panic is the best and perhaps only effective salesperson. To change to a new pool of IP addresses requires an industry overhaul even greater than that IT professionals went through to keep Y2K just a scare at the dawn of 2000. Shifting to a new pool of dramatically different addresses means making changes to every Internet-connected device, router and switch on the network.

"If you don't have to do anything, most of these people won't do it," said Cody Christman, product engineering director at Japan phone giant NTT, whose DoCoMo wireless subsidiary is one of the few major carriers that has made the leap.

Two googols
Internet Protocol version 6 is its formal na