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IPv6 Adoption Up 300 Percent Over 2 Years
Mark.J - ISPreview writes "The Number Resource Organization, which is made up of the five Regional Internet Registries, has revealed that the rate of new entrants into the IPv6 routing system has increased by 300% over the past two years. The news is important because IPv4 addresses (e.g. 123.23.56.98), which are assigned to your computer periodically, are running out. IPv6 addressing (e.g. 2ffe:1800:3525:3:200:f8ff:fe21:67cf) was invented as a longer and more secure replacement." IPv6 is still gaining ground slowly, particularly in the US.
God, I'm tired of it being repeated that IPV4 addresses are running out. Everybody who's not a journalist should know that it's not true.
There's no reason every person on earth needs an IP. Nat+uPNP is perfectly capable and 100% backwords compatible.
That really isn't entirely true.
NAT and uPnP may work well for your average home user... But it causes some headaches in larger networks. And if you've got a pile of servers that need to be globally accessible - like webservers - you don't really have an alternative to multiple IP addresses.
That's not even getting into all the millions of unused IP's being held by the early internet companies.
This is certainly true. There are several huge blocks of IP addresses sitting unused. Freeing these up would go a long way towards keeping IPv4 alive. At least for a while...
IP's just need to be charged for on a early basis. Start with $1 per year per ip to EVERYONE who owns an IP's and you'll see the "IP Shortage" vanish overnight.
It might very well vanish overnight... But it'll return eventually. The fact of the matter is that we keep coming up with new reasons to route information over the Internet. And all these new devices and gadgets require an IP address.
One of the cities that we support recently bought a new chiller for their ice rink. Their old one was just managed in-house. You had to be standing in front of the device to do much of anything. And if it was malfunctioning they had to send someone out to eyeball the machine. Their new one has a network jack and can be monitored remotely through a web interface. So we had to get them bandwidth and a static IP address so they could keep an eye on things even when nobody was physically at the civic center.
Sure, there are some absolutely stupid and frivolous things we're doing these days. Folks don't need to be able to surf the Internet from their microwave oven. But it is getting to the point where we expect to be able to gather information from just about everything, and view it just about everywhere. Folks expect to be able to hit Google or Wikipedia from their cell phones. Lots of industrial equipment can be managed remotely. I know I routinely troubleshoot issues remotely.
To a certain degree we can hide these devices behind NAT... I can have a dozen web-enabled appliances in my house and just use different ports forwarded through a single NAT'ed IP address to access them. But what about devices that don't necessarily sit behind a router? What about my web-enabled phone?
And what happens when the ISPs start running out of addresses? Are they going to install giant NAT routers themselves? Are we going to wind up with several layers of NAT?
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
Any chance Slashdot could get IPv6 connectivity?
Progress in this direction is "stuff that matters", after all...