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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."
Class E addresses are still under the "Reserved for Future Use" mantra.
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I'll take all the addresses I can :-)
If I get enough for free, we will have to use IPV6..
I think I want a screensaver where each pixel has an ip, and then we can replace X with a simple protocol just sending colors!!
I enjoyed both of the articles. The question I have is this. With the number of networks now being NATed and the such, will we ever truly need something like IPv6? It seems like whe I hear about it, the talk is always that every device will have a unique IP address. But what I see is that large deployments of devices needing IP addresses are more and more being done using 192.* or 10.* addresses. Anyone else have more insight?
Random Musings
So yeah, it'll take 20 years to exhaust the space. Let's wait until 2029 to switch to IPv6.
Or instead start switching now (after all, it'll probably take atleast 10 years to get everything switched over) and not worry about IPs until we're extinct.
The cost of moving to IPv6 is going to be so huge that it will remain a research project until the benefits are correspondingly irresistable.
It will almost always be cheaper to hack IPv4 than to switch to IPv6, and this will be the rule for 99% of IP users.
My prediction is that IPv6 will never come into general use, we will stick with IPv4 for at least 40-50 more years. I have absolutely no idea what will replace IPv4, something will, but it will not be IPv6.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
This message was posted on a mailing list in response to a post that claimed that IPv6 would be widespread by 2005 due to an IPv4 address shortage
NATs, unfortunately, made a need to switch over to IPv6 wholly unnecessary. Such a switchover will probably not happen for at least another ten years. Even ten years ago, we were "running out of" IPv4 space due to incredibly inefficient allocations using the "class based addressing" method - by which your network was deemed to either to likely possess 253 computers, 65,533 computers, or 16,777,213 computers. A specific network was identified by 24, 16, or 8 bits. (The more bits it takes to identify a network, the more networks can exist but at the expense of having fewer unique addresses per network.)
This was quickly determined to be an inordinate waste of addresses and as early as the early 90's folks were predicting we'd rapidly run out of addresses. So class allocations changed a little, and instead of giving an organization with 1000 computers a class B (with 65,533 useable addresses), they'd give them four class C's (with 1012 addresses). This helped stem the tide for a bit and arguably saved the Internet's ass, but it was clear that a more elegant system for identifying networks was needed.
After some backbone technology re-architecting, a new scheme called Classless Internet Domain Routing, or CIDR was introduced, which allowed bit-sized granularity, meaning that a network was identified by exactly as many bits as you needed. Your network could possess 13 computers, or 16,381 computers, and the system could deal with that efficiently. CIDR definitely also helped save the Internet's ass. But the addresses kept on coming; that dang Internet was getting popular very quickly! Pundits started talking about The Great IPv6 changeover, despite the fact that less than one person in 100 on the Internet had an IPv6-enabled operating system.
Then came NATs. While Network Address Translation had been used in many environments, it hadn't really taken off tremendously. Then Linksys released a rather affordable cute little blue box. This piece of hardware let home users plug in several computers to the blue box, configure it with a web interface, jack in their cable/DSL connection and suddenly be sharing Internet access easily with everyone in the house, using one IP address and so fooling the ISP into thinking that there was only one computer using the Internet (many ISPs either don't permit or don't have the infrastructure to give out multiple addresses to a customer). These NATs had a secondary benefit, which was that by default, all incoming connections from the outside are dropped on the floor. I'm not sure Linksys had such "firewalling" in mind when originally designing the device - it's purely a practical issue. I mean, if someone says to a NAT "here's this piece of information" - to who which of the four connected computers should the NAT send it? By default, the NAT will give up and just drop the sorry packet. This means that when you're behind a NAT, you're protected from a whole class of Internet attacks. This realization further drove adoption.
Companies with low IT budgets realized that they wouldn't have to buy extra IP addresses from their ISP (which often came at a premium) and that they could have simple firewalling without a complex configuration. Both companies and people could not see the inherent value in having each of their computers have an Internet-deliverable address, and there was real value (protection) to be had in NOT be addressable from the Internet.
This, again, saved the Internet's ass. Instead of an organization of 1000 needing a class B, wasting hundreds of thousands of IPs, or even four Class Cs, this organization now only needs a single IP address to cover all of its desktops. Now instead of thinking about IP addresses as computer addresses, they have started to become network addresses, which is to say,
La via sola al paradiso incommincia nel inferno
IPv6 also provides security infrastructure.
Imagine a world where you can trust the "from" IP address in a packet.
I thought the current issue with IPv4 was not the limited number of ip addresses, but the increased routing tables brought on by classless routing? These days, the central routers on the Internet have routing tables which are huge, which must cost someone somewhere to upgrade them.
IPv6 was supposed to deal with this issue as much as it dealt with the number of ip addresses available, in that it would revert back to a semi class based routing set, with ISPs being assigned a range of addresses.
Thats how I understood it when I asked anyhow.
The entire second article is null and void for this reason, quoted from the article:
Of course such projections are based on the underlying assumption that tomorrow will be much like today, and the visible changes that have occurred in the past will smoothly translate to continued change in the future. There are some obvious weaknesses in this assumption, and many events could disrupt this prediction.
The argument that we're going to run out of space is based on the assumption that in the (near) future MANY MANY household appliances and objects which don't currently have anything to do with the internet are going to become attached to it.
~Berj
If ipv4 isn't broke, then there's no need to fix it with ipv6: instead, the time is used to allow ipv6 killer apps (your fridge telling your tv that you need more milk) to further mature. Like BBSes and JaNET had Internet gateways, there'll eventually be gateways between ipv4 and ipv6 Internets, and it'll suddenly be with us as if it always had been.
About then we should be discussing whether housebricks should have IP addresses to report being dug through, or whether being able to detect movement means it could detect the movement from soundwaves, people talking. I can only hope I don't have to shout into each brick the serial number from the inevitable shrinkwrap license.
IPv6 will eventually be adopted, because the way IPv4 addresses are allocated, many regions of the world *do* have a shortage of addresses. In particular, Asia has a serious shortage of IPv4 addresses. In fact, I know of people who run IPv6-only machines in Japan (because there are 6to4 addresses that allow you to reach IPv4 servers with approximately the same functionality as NAT).
Moreover, as people deploy new infrastructure, they may be forced to use IPv6. For example, at some point every cell phone is going to have a routable IP address--and that is definitely going to require IPv6.
So while North American desktop machines are unlikely to be switched to IPv6 any time soon, it will happen in other parts of the world and for other types of hardware.
it's a race between IPv6 and *NIX running out of timestamp room in an int... only 3227004721 seconds to go!
While we're at it, we should switch to a 5 digit date for the year. Because you know it's going to be Y2k all over again in the year 9999.
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
At a certain point in the middle of the last decade, everyone thought they would run out of IP addresses. Work was then put into routers and firewalls to bring to the masses the CIDR and NAT to stem the tide. Now on cisco routers you can do fancy port forwarding to use several servers behind one IP. All this work however could have been replaced by investing in ipv6. The fact that ipv6 is not being implemented means investment is being put into a scheme in which people will eventually run out of IP addresses, while there is a complete alternative available.
The single biggest damaging factor of ipv4 is the fact that you cant really run servers behind it. There are already ISPs in many countries that provide service from behind a NAT firewall. This kills many people's freedom of speech and the spirit of the Internet where everyone had their own servers and ran whatever they wanted.
The second damaging factor of the ipv4 is the control that IANA has. Both ICANN and IANA have been used politically and now we have many American ISPs churning out 4 IPs per person and 64 IPs per company, mostly going to waste while ISPs in some countrys like Pakistan's PakNET have 100,000 customers behind one IP none of whom can run their own servers.
ipv6 can fix all these problems in one fell swoop, simplify routing enormously and introduce IPSec and other security technologies.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
The author is looking at the rate of IPv4 address allocation, and extrapolating future growth based on the current rate. This is a severely flawed methodology, because it does not take into account efficiency of utilization.
Ten years ago, as the author notes, most networks used around 1% of their allocated IP addresses. Now, networks are expected to use over 50% of their addresses before they can receive a larger allocation. As a result, while the number of *allocated* addresses has not been growing rapidly, the number of *used* addresses certainly has.
Unfortunately, utilization efficiency is bounded -- it's hard to use more than 100% of your allocated IP addresses. As a result, the rate at which IP addresses are allocated is likely to take a sharp turn upwards, as organizations which until now have been making efficiency improvements, find that they really do need a larger address allocation.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
I saw an academic paper late last year stating that NAT's and finer subnetting had resulted in a reduction of nearly 30% of allocated IP addresses. That is the first time I saw the "IP shortage no longer a realistic possibility" argument.
To be clear IP shortave wasn't a myth. There was a time where even conservative projections were pointing towards a dearth of IPs. A solution needed to be implemented. IPv6 was one option, NATs and subnetting was another. The market seems to have chosen this last .
I like the idea of a good NAT firewall with private addresses inside. This way you only use 1 IP on the outside.
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
Whereas this isn't really related, I've just put up a resource for geolocation of IP's to country/city. It'd be cool if some slashdotters were to type in/select their city - only takes 10 seconds :-)
:-)
The url is hostip.info. The idea is to provide a free geolocation service that you can download the DB from. All the other ones I've found are either pay-for, limited in what you can do, or only to country-resolution. At the moment, this is just to country-resolution as well, but who knows how far it'll go
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Most ISPs are making good $ charging out the ass for multiple IPs.
Comcast wants something like 20 bucks extra a month for each extra IP. Folks who don't understand firewalls and routers and NATs think they need one for their Xbox, PS2, laptop, etc.. Of course, they can only claim they need to charge because of the shortage within the IPv4 addressing space.
IPv6 makes this means of income obsolete. We all know that phone, cable, and media companies absolutely HATE when an improved technology comes along and makes their business model null and void.
IPv4 is here to stay for a long while.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
And this is different from the current situation with IPV4 HOW??
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
Not at all.
Just because you have an assigned network doesn't mean that that network (or all parts of that network) has to be connected. You could even NAT an assigned address behind a firewall if you wanted, and never put out any routing information. It would be just as secure as a non-assigned address, but very convenient in many situations.
For example, I'm setting up an ad hoc VPN right now between several companies collaborating on a project. Naturally, we are not giving access to each others LANs, but separate segments. Howver, we can't ignore the unassigned addresss used by the other partners. If he uses 192.168.100.0/24 for his LAN, I can't use it for my VLAN segment.
Another example is when companies merge. They could just plug their LANs in and know everythign would work.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The problem with IPv4 does not seem to be the lack of address space, but that will be a telling factor when/if a switch is made.
The major problems are, as has been mentioned, its inefficiencies and its current state. Currently the IPv4 standard is a cobbled together mess. VLSMs and NATing are late additions to the game, and are merely attempts to save an old and dying hulk. The fact remains that no matter what we add to IPv4, it will always be inefficient. In IPv6, most of these methods are inherent and relatively efficient. The mere fact that they are inherent as opposed to added on makes the standard a better one than IPv4 will ever be. Heck, IPv6 even has features that IPv4 doesn't (And probably won't).
Address space, though, will play a significant part. The graphs and projections are all well and good, but I don't believe they take into account many of the factors involved. As broadband and DSL become more popular and more implemented, it is going to increase the demand for static addresses. Even though there are bad points to having a static address, there are also good points. People will want to have their own address for everything from their cell phones to their home LANs to whatever you can think of. The rush of in the early 90's is nothing compared to what's coming. We have to account for the further IPzation of all products in life, from cars to houses to coffeemakers to refrigerators. Home networks are on the spread. All these things are going to make people want more addresses, addresses that IPv4 can't provide, and even if it could, it would be inefficient, time-consuming, and slower than any thing that IPv6 would provide. This will drive a move away from IPv4. As youngsters become more and more used to the changing faces of tech, they will become more educated in its use as well. This will mean that today's techies will be tomorrow's average citizen. I, personally, don't know of any geek, techie, nerd, whatever you want to call it, who likes using a system that is old, broken, and inefficient to boot! Maybe you do, but I doubt it. These tech savvy youngsters, coupled with increasingly knowledgeable management (hey, it could happen!) would only increase the drive away from IPv4.
And finally, I think that the authors forgot to take in to account the fact that most growth in certain fields happens exponentially. Most of the technologies that will drive a move away from IPv4 are new, or not old enough to be established. As soon as they age just a bit, and the bad ones are weeded out, the growth in those fields will rise by leaps and bounds. We have seen it with television, radio, cell phones, and most especially computers. To predict an almost linear line of growth is approaching on the naive! Like I said, growth states slow and rapidly increases after it reaches critical mass.
With all that said, may IPv4 rest in peace. Long live IPv6!
When the Bell system was broken up, the phone system's allocation scheme for area codes and prefix blocks was disrupted. Phone service providers were issued blocks of 10,000 phone numbers with a given prefix, from which they allocated local customers. There was no method for reclaiming unused portions of blocks from independent phone companies. So long as one number from a block remained in use, that prefix block could not be reallocated. THAT is why we suddenly needed new area codes--not because we had run out of unused phone numbers. At the time the new area codes were issued, the actual in service phone numbers comprised less than 50% of the available pool.
So please stop telling me there is no problem. I thought the basic premise of capitalism was that a resource that is plentiful should be available for a low price?
Saying that NAT solves the problem is shortsighted. You can put many clients behind a NAT, setting up many servers is more difficult. Sooner or later, each portable phone will have an IP stack, and thus will need an address. As long as those phones are clients, NAT will do the trick, but sooner or later somebody will want to build an application where each phone is a server...
Using NAT is the same kind of kludge than using offsets for 16 bits pointers in the 8086 instead of 32 bits pointers it worked for some time, but ultimately it was not the solution.
I'm not saying I have a god given right for an IP address, but that for certain application, peer-to-peer, it will help. I will not be surprised when china or Japan has the next killer app that runs on portable phones, or lots of small computers and basically was possible because the region adopted IP6. When this happens, the same guys who are now saying the IP6 is irrelevant will bemoan the fact that this opportunity was neglected by politics.
You might argue that the problem is not the address space, but the organisation distributing them - as with food, this is true (but I did not hear Bush saying that Montesanto should stop doing better crop and improve food distribution in the world). In the end, this is a political problem - in general it is easier to solve technical problems.
Fairly recently as compared to when? I remember using ftp behind NAT years ago, back in the mid-90s...and boy does that sound strange.
Anyhow, the stuff now works and is stable (and has for years), so there's no reason to whine about stability, etc. If your software doesn't work behind NAT, it's because they hired an inexperienced network guy to write the code.
Why not complain about something else, like the crappy X server stuff?
A lot of the reason why IPv4 won't run out is due to the fact that it's so hard to get any space. With extremely strict assignment rules, of course it will be a while before they are all used up.
Unfortunately, this just means that the ugly hack known as NAT will continue to be used, breaking many applications and protocols, not to mention external reachability of many devices. If there was reachability to all devices, the net would be a lot more useful for controlling embedded devices, but then we'd quickly use up a lot of space more quickly.
Address space is only a part of the reason to move to IPv6. There are plenty of other features which should be reason enough to move over:
- Auto address configuration
- No more LAN renumbering/resizing games
- Built in tunnelling functions for portable devices
- Simpler address hierarchy
- Address renumbering is much simpler, and will soon be do-able automatically
- Standardised IPSec functionality in all devices
IPv4 will not run out with the current allocation guidelines - but it will continue to have incredibly restricted functionality due to NAT.
Sparks:Gadget:Beer Maker
Well at least I have. I want to run https/ftps on several of my subdomains, but I only have one ip. I can only use https with one hostname per ip.
That's just one example. Another is sending a file or playing a game or whatever between two computer each behind a different NAT. You have to do ugly port forwarding rules that might be more or less huge ranges. People have to learn how tcp/ip works on a level completely unnecessary unless you're a techie. And god forbid you want to run two public game servers behind the same nat (many games don't let you specify port to connect to).
NAT is a necessity, not a feature. Things would be so much easier if it wasn't needed.
If you like to keep your MAC there, you can use that. It has a lot of advantages. But if you don't like it, you don't have to use it. It's a free world. You can number your machines in a Fibonacci sequence if you prefer.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
I'll take all the addresses I can. Do you work at MIT?
From the article: The IANA policies for allocation of IPv4 address blocks to the RIRs are applied fairly and are based purely on the documented need for address space.
Europe has far fewer IP addresses than North American organizations, which have been assigned 74% of all current IPv4 addresses.
Both Stanford and MIT have more IP addresses than all of China.
the original parent states that this article could spell bad news for the ipv6 rollout. Yet, i see no reason why it should have any bearing on ipv6 at all. Why should the ipv6 rollout wait until we have no ip space left in 20 years. Why not switch over and let the availability of space drive innovation for new ideas to use that address space. Theres nothing saying we can't migrate to ipv7, 8, 9, 10 whatever some day later on. ipv6 should proceed at whatever rate the industry is ready for, not by when we are almost out of time. Much the same with our fossil fuel situation, IMHO.
I am not in favor of IPv6 being rolled out. I think at the present time, it will amplify all the existing problems we have yet to solve.
I can appreciate the improved security and anti-spoofing provisions but the cons outweigh the pros. Most of what people are expecting to see with IPv6 will likely not be available to them. It's unlikely that broadband ISPs will give their customers more address space in order to avoid using NAT.
NATs and VPNs serve very valuable uses within a safe and secure-computing model. If more address space means less people will be using VPNs, that's a bad thing. It will result in more vulnerability of more machines and more headaches for everyone.
We also have the spamming/DOS issue, which is completely out of hand. There are measures that could be taken with the existing system which would dramatically reduce these problems. Moving to IPv6 will only make things worse until we adopt more regulation of the existing network systems.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the area of RBLs. A move to IPv6 would largely wipe out all smtp-based anti-spam blacklisting.
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.
Perhaps, but IPv6 will make addresses cheap and plentiful. Right now I pay $10 a month for one static IP. I want there to be so many addresses available that providers start advertising "Over 60,000 static IPs free with every account!" (Or the equivalent in name-based routing or any other technology that makes it quick and easy for me to throw another box on the network and connect it to the rest of the world.)
Five percent of one year's DoD budget puts us on Mars.
Unless maybe Microsoft 1) puts it on all new Windows OS
.. let's say you are the next google, amazon, ebay, etc. You want to set a web site, will you choose IPv4 or IPv6? Of *course* you will choose IPv4, because most people are using it.
:-) Where exactly do you see there's such a major difference that you'll suffer from choosing IPv6?
:-)
:-O
You can already get the IPv6 layer for Windows XP. There's even a basic version for it included in XP, although an improved version with more features are available free to download from Microsoft. I recall it wasn't included for the simple reason it wasn't ready.
I'd be really surprised if there wasn't decent IPv6 support in Windows Longhorn.
Now
What are you talking about? What do you mean with next Google? Just because Google doesn't speak IPv4 doesn't mean they have to redesign the service. LOL. It's almost like you think the users or webmasters will need to care about whether they're connected to IPv6 or not? Users just type w-w-w-.-g-o-o-g-l-e-.-c-o-m as usual. Web masters just upload the content to their host as usual. If the host has a DNS entry, then that's just a matter of typing in the name of the host.
Let's say you are an ISP customer, your ISP offers you an IPv6 address, or an IPv4 address. The IPv4 address will access all sites (because we're in the middle of the changeover, remember), and the IPv6 address will access, maybe, a handful of geeky sites.
No, if an IPv6 transition occurs, all IPv4 addresses will be reachable in the new IPv6 format, since a special address space in IPv6 is allocated for this. After a while, more and more will switch to "real" IPv6 addresses. But the customers will never really have to care about these technicalities. They just get their dot com and is happy.
I think I'm getting where your key misunderstanding and basis for your post is. You think IPv6 wasn't designed to coexist transparently with IPv4. Well, surprise there, it is.
This is subtle but I believe the changeover will NEVER happen, and the BSD/Linux, etc, machines that are all rearin' to go with IPv6 will be used only for private networks (behind NAT and/or tunnel boxes, ironically).
Why not on internet? IPv6 was designed from the ground to coexist with IPv4 after all. Routers only supporting IPv6 routing will be able to wrap IPv4 addresses and transmit data to IPv4 hosts, and fix the addresses back so the IPv4-only supporting host will never even know it's connected to an IPv6 network.
why do I care if it breaks an obsolete protocol like FTP??
Maybe you don't, but a world outside your ego bubble does, including both corporations and home users. Wake up.
NAT is the right solution for IP address shortage. Instead of wasting time with IPv6, they should've been looking at lower-level NAT routing/addressing protocols that are backwards-compatible, if that's possible.
Ooh, I'm so happy you aren't a network protocol designer.
You seem to have quite a bit of reading to do to catch up with the latest advancements in the IPv6 area and especially how invisibly it can coexist with IPv4. Of course the designers never thought "let's do this protocol, make it totally incompatible, so no one will ever be able to switch smoothly".
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
...is the biggest fallacy I have ever heard of, especially for people who make extensive use of them. You end up forwarding legions of ports for all the services that must be exposed to the internet, all from one ip address. This means hackers have ONE ip address that effectively has hundreds of services running on it, instead of many different computers with one or two services, which takes much longer to scan.
It is true that public ip addresses might expose all the *nix computers running sshd, and all the windows computers running smb, but that's what a firewall is for! And one has to have a firewall equivalent (i.e., a machine that all packets must route through) anyway if he's using NAT. Most NAT boxes are firewalls, too.
The only downside to public ip addresses is that it isn't strictly necessary to have a packet filtering solution to get up and running. But only a fool would set up a corporate network w/o some sort of protection.
In short, it is actually less work to configure a simple firewall which blocks everything to public ips than it is to configure a simple NAT solution which blocks everything to private ips. And once you start forwarding ports, it's actually the NAT that's less secure, because of the single point of entry. Let's not forget as well that people often "DMZ" one of their internal machines, exposing an entire machine to the outside, which again is far worse than a public, firewalled ip.
Again, public ips w/o a firewall is an even more insecure situation, but public ips aren't less secure per se. They're less secure in the hands of a fool.
-Dan
You know the one. It says that "We don't nee IPV6 because we have NAT". It's the same kind of thinking that says that The Internet == The Web. Just because NAT solves a certain subclass of problems that are more naturally solved by extra addresses, doesn't mean that there is no need for IPV6 because there's NAT.
NAT works great for things like the web, which are initiated behind the NAT machine, and don't make any connections back through the NAT machine. But The Web != The Internet. Even FTP has problems with NAT, but at least those problems are well understood by now. When the original connection is made from the outside world, trying to contact something behind the NAT box, that's when problems start.
Some people see this difficulty in reaching the machines behind the NAT box as security. It isn't. If you have no other forms of security, it helps a little bit, but it's more like a side effect. Saying that this is security is like saying that a rusty lock is more secure than a new one because it is harder to get the key into it. A stopped analog clock isn't right twice a day, it just appears to be right twice a day, but that doesn't mean it is ever working.
If a NAT machine were replaced with a simple firewall machine with a closed-down firewall, you'd have the exact same kind of security. No packets get routed to the machines on the other side of the firewall unless the rules permit it. The only difference is that it avoids a lot of hacks. Rather than having to do "ssh -p 10322 mynatbox.mydomain.com" and having to remember that 10322 corresponds to your mail server, you can simply say "ssh mailserver.mydomain.com"
Doing away with NAT also makes true peer-to-peer networking possible. Currently it doesn't work, you need some kind of a server because you can't initiate connections from the outside world to the NATted boxes. P2P doesn't just mean swapping songs, but also networked gaming.
This is all just about routable addresses so far, but IPV6 is so much more than that. There are features of IPV6 like security that IPV4 simply doesn't offer.
So remember kids, The Web != The Internet, and NAT != IPV6, nor can NAT do everything you can do with routable addresses.
The article is rubbish for several reasons.
Even on its own terms, it predicts we run out of IPv4 addresses in about 20 years. That seems like the age of the universe to the 20-something kid who wrote the article. To those of us with a little more experience, it is not a long time at all to do something as major as converting the Internet to a different addressing scheme.
But the basic assumption of the article, that the present situation is OK and the only reason to migrate is to avoid it worsening, is wrong. In many countries, the IPv4 address shortage is very severe today, not in 20 years from now. IP addresses are expensive in the countries where most people live.
Finally, NAT is not a solution, it's a workaround. Many peer-to-peer applications simply do not work behind a NAT. Sure it lets machines surf the web, send email, and use clients like ftp, telnet, and ssh, but the Internet is much more than a handful of client/server apps. NAT is strangling it.
I am a more-or-less typical internet user. I have a cable modem from RCN for my household which happens to have 4-6 computers. Of course, right now I am using NAT. This is an incredibly lame solution for a number of reasons which have been discussed exhaustively here already.
RCN provides me with a connection, X bandwidth, and 1 IP.
My incremental cost of more IPs on the same connection and bandwidth is prohibitively high. (I would consider a penny or two per month per IP to be "reasonable" since each IP should have trivial overhead for the ISP)
Ergo, we are out of IPs already.
I'm not a smorgasbord.
The *only* (and fatal) flaw with IPv6 is lack of backward-compatibility.
And it's never, ever going to work without it...
http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html
(and he really does have the best host/domain/tld combo in existence)
I browse at +5 Flamebait- moderation for all or moderation for none.
A more cogent point to be made: all of these operating systems that currently support IPv6 do not have the full suite of transition mechanisms that are required to keep the user from having to know whether they are using IPv4 or IPv6 for any given application.
There's a long list of important transition mechanism protocols that need to be deployed to smooth the transition to IPv6, e.g. 6to4, Teredo, NAPT, etc. And they just aren't there yet.
Another thing that has to be fixed before IPv6 will start showing up is dual-stack IPv6/IPv4 residential gateway boxes. There are specs for these things floating around, and that implies that there are people planning to build them and roll them out.
But right now, your average cable-modem system and DSL router are designed to give customers exactly one IPv4 address (and maybe not even a public realm one). Getting IPv6 deployed over the top of this infrastructure is an ongoing process. It's happening now, but it will take years. Maybe even the better part of this decade. Maybe more.
Most people reading this thread will eventually upgrade to IPv6... without knowing it. A few will upgrade only when they discover how much more they're spending on maintainance of their old IPv4 network compared to what they would have spent if they had upgraded to IPv6 earlier. The rest of you will be killing yourselves, trying to keep from upgrading to IPv6, because you all belong to some kind of sick religious cult.
--
jhw