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Dispelling the IPv4 Address Shortage Myth
Zocalo writes "While looking up some WHOIS information at RIPE just now I noticed a couple of articles about the IPv4 address space allocation status. IPv4 Address Space: October 2003 is a short summary by RIPE themselves, and IPv4 - How long have we got? is from July 2003, but has lots more detail and pretty graphs!
In short, the "Death of the Internet" due to lack of IP space is a myth, which doesn't bode well for getting IPv6 rolled out any time soon."
Check this presentation: mms://webcast.ripe.net/ripe46/plenary-2.wmv
Daxy's Networking Blog
This is done because we have to, not because we want to. If IPv6 was a reality today i would put many machines with a public IP address that today are behind NAT.
rm -rf /home/leia
For philosophical reasons, there's some opposition to the mass NAT-ing of the Internet; it tends to break the equality between computers, creating the artificial distinction between servers and clients (just imagine all the pain you have to go through to use your favorite P2P/game/whatever behind a NAT router). IPv6 will solve that, although NAT will probably continue for other reasons.
My insight is to say that your right on the mark. NAT killed IPv6. Also, now with the focus more on security, more people are seeing isolated networks with single points of IDS monitoring as solid solutions to security. Hence people put everything on a non routable blocks of IPs and put a snort NAT box at the head end.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
According to their study, yes it will take 20 years for 100% of the address space to be used up. But there was a study done (trying to find the URL right now..) saying that once we reach a critical mass of around 85% usage, it will become nearly impossible for an organization to obtain new address space. At this point, we will essentially be in a crisis-state, where no one will be able to request more space.
Ok, this is idocy. Yes, the net can survive with NAT. The thing is, IPv6 is about looking forward.
If every phone, mobile phone, internet appliance, whatever had a publicly available internet address, things like VoIP could be routed over the internet, be more secure, have better latency, possibility of point to point encryption, etc. It would drive down the cost of mobile internet service, and make service better on the whole. Want your home phone# to ring your cellphone or computer? Forward it.
Phone numbers of the future should be like URLs. phone.yourname.com, mobile.yourname.com, and you could have as many of these as you could want to resolve to your phone's address. Want to have your cell listed by your employeer? joesmith.bigcompany.com. Confrence calls? IPv6 has much better facility for multicasting. Video, etc etc etc. are all quite possible.
It's not that complicated. IPv6 represents a paradigm shift for future accessible technologies, that aren't possible/interoperable any other way. People want mobile internet aware devices, lots of them.
What I want is to be able to subscribe to a mobile carrier like I would an ISP. They host my connection, give me some benefits (web space, whatever, more data transfer), and charge me for the byte. It's redicliously expensive to use internet enabled phones in most places in the world--Especially concidering that voice data is so much larger, by nature..