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IPv4 Will Not Die In 2010
darthcamaro writes "A couple of years ago, the big shots at IANA (that's the people that handle internet addressing) issued a release stating that the IPv4 address space was likely to be gone by 2010. Here we are in 2010 and guess what, IPv4 with its 4.3 billion addresses will NOT be all used up this year. In fact there could be another two years worth of addresses still left at this point. 'We're at about 10.2 percent (IPv4 address space) remaining globally,' John Curran, president and CEO of ARIN said. 'At our current trend rate we've got about 625 days before we will not have new IPv4 addresses available. We're still handling IPv4 requests from ISPs, hosting companies and large users for IPv4 address space, but that's a very short time period.'"
Worse than that, we'll continue to deal with the issues NAT causes, and I'm sure the various money grubbing ISP's will charge even more for additional IPs as we run out.
I predict that 2012 we will still have available IPv4 addresses.
This will happen because some IPv4 addresses will be reallocated as client-side doesn't need IPv4 addresses in IPv6 to access IPv4 resources. So IPv6 adaptation it self will slow the need to migrate to IPv6 as singular Internet Protocol.
You're correct... I'm careful to point out the uncertainty when doing the interviews, but reporters tend to lock onto the IPv4 depletion countdown number regardless...
Yes there are a lot of ipv6 addresses, however looking at the total size of a 128 bit address space is very misleading as ipv6 addresses are designed to be allocated in a more heirachical manner and designed to support stateless autoconfiguration for clients. Originally end sites were meant to be allocated a /48 though ripe now seems to be pushing for smaller allocations to smaller end sites.
Plus only 2::/3 is assigned to the ipv6 internet with other address space being reserved for other purposes.
Those figures would give us 2^45 end sites, this should be enough that we don't run out of addresses any time soon but it's a lot less than the ammount people assume from just looking at the number of bits in the IP.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
There are going to be lots of little solutions that will stretch out IPv4 for a while.
One that I came up would be to offer a financial incentive to reclaim unused blocks of addresses. Ten or fifteen years ago, IP address space was handed out like candy. You could get a class C block readily, and class B blocks just needed a little justification. I did some contract work in the late 90s for a company that I still keep up with, and they have a few entire C nets in their possession and not in use. Now how do we get these back? There is going to be demand for IP addresses, and as the supply becomes more and more limited, that demand will make people desperate.
So why not let people who already have address space sell what they have? It does reward unrightfully holding onto stuff, but if these addresses are needed, then hey!