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Whatever Happened To the IPv4 Address Crisis?
alphadogg writes "In February 2011, the global Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) allocated the last blocks of IPv4 address space to the five regional Internet registries. At the time, experts warned that within months all available IPv4 addresses in the world would be distributed to ISPs. Soon after that, unless everyone upgraded to IPv6, the world would be facing a crisis that would hamper Internet connectivity for everyone. That crisis would be exacerbated by the skyrocketing demand for IP addresses due to a variety of factors: the Internet of Things (refrigerators needing their own IP address); wearables (watches and glasses demanding connectivity); BYOD (the explosion of mobile devices allowed to connect to the corporate network); and the increase in smartphone use in developing countries. So, here we are three years later and the American Registry for Internet Numbers is still doling out IPv4 addresses in the United States and Canada. Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?"
While phones use Internet connectivity, they usually connect through the carrier infrastructure which may only allocate a few (or even 1) IPv4 addresses, thanks to NAT.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Just a guess, but maybe widespread adoption of Carrier Grade NAT might have given IPv4 a bit of a longer shelf life. It's either that or the kind of fun and games that I once read that Hutchison (Orange) was doing on their mobile network, with no less than seven separate instances of the 10/8 network being juggled around at once.
Still, even ARIN is now starting to tighten the screws on the size of netblocks they are assigning out, so I suspect providers are being a lot more careful about how they subnet and assign out IP addresses than they used to be. I suspect that just moving stuff like DB servers and other backend infrastructure onto private IP space instead of just dumping them in the DMZ for convenience has helped a bit too, not too mention being a better security practice.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
It's only a crisis if it affects you. (sic)
That's basically what is happening, a giant stand off between the access networks and the hosting providers looking who will blink first.
From then end user perspective, you should see what happens to Skype and games when both end-users are behind a double NAT, it's hilarious. But most people seem to cope just fine.
For the hosting providers then fun really starts when you can't get a public IPv4 for your new webserver, that'll be fun. There's no NAT workaround for that, some european hosting providers are already feeling the crunch in their IPv4 blocks, you can only host so many servers. So what can you do? Jack up the prices ofcourse, isn't the free market wonderful!
If you are a business in the EMEA and you still want or need your own PI space for BGP, tough cookies, you can't get it anymore.
Yes, that is exactly how IPv6 is supposed to work.
Possibly, but not necessarily even that. You could be set up to simply automatically generate IPv6 addresses from your MACs, and the ISP doesn't even explicitly grant you an address block.
Another part of the answer...take back the class A allotments that were given to companies/organizations early on.
Why does this myth persist? Modded Interesting, even. This proves that education is the major barrier to IPv6 adoption.
We can't "take back" the class A allotments because there is no "back" to take it to. Those were given by Jon Postel before IANA existed, and IANA does not claim any more legal authority to those addresses than anybody else. It's an unwise investment of limited resources to challenge those companies' legal departments.
Also, with the rate that IPv4 addresses were being allocated, and the acceleration of the rate before 2011, those addresses would have postponed IPv4 exhaustion by months at best. It's surely not worth the expense to force all those companies to release their class A networks just so we could collectively fail to do our jobs, that is, switch to IPv6.
Have a nice time.
Google agrees. They're probably a bit less US-centric.
As bad as the ISPs in the US are, we're actually a world leader in v6 traffic. Comcast, Time Warner (the ones I have personal experience with) and apparently Verizon are all doing v6 natively and properly. That accounts for a huge percentage of customers - as they get around to replacing their gateways, it should "just work".
-- reply ends, general comments begin --
Just so everybody's clear what I mean by "just work" - when I moved into my new apartment, I rented a modem/router from the cableco (I of course bought my own a few weeks later like a good nerd). Out of the box, it requested a /64 prefix and delegated it to the internal network, including the v6 DNS servers. All OSes made in the last 10 years know how to do v6 properly, so everything from my desktop to my phone to my smart TV can access v6 resources just fine.
v6 is here. It works great, and you get real IPs! Like, you can actually paste an IP to a friend so he can download a file from your box just like the old days, without doing any NAT port mapping bullshit. Want to play a game, or video chat, or VNC or something? Just open a damn socket, no STUN or UPnP or any other crap.
I don't get why so many Slashdotters are bitching/FUDding about v6. There's no money in it - all the ISPs are doing it happily - so it's not astroturfing. And the comments don't fit the typical troll model. What gives?
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.