End of Internet is near according to Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The problem is the exhaustion of internet addresses (IP addresses) , More than 85% of the internet addresses have been allocated and according to OECD rest will end by early 2011. Internet addresses are the addresses used to recognize individual devices connected to internet. Without the availability of internet address a device cannot connect to internet, its just like having a home (computing device) but no address hence nobody can contact you.
Internet addresses are presently following IPv4 scheme of addressing which has around 4 billion addresses. When this scheme was introduced in 1981 there were less than 500 computers and nobody thought that 4 billion addresses will end up so soon. Internet boom and the exponential increase in the number of internet devices has defied all laws and led to the exhaustion of addresses so soon.
The solution is already present but has not been implemented widely. Introduction of IPv6 can easily solve the issues by pumping around 16 billion IP addresses. Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on Wednesday urged Department of Telecommunications (DoT) “the fast growth of Internet and likely migration towards NGN (next generation networks) will require IPv6 addresses. In this background, (the) creation of a National Internet Registry (NIR) is urgently required”.
Penrose is hosting a digital doomsday clock which calculates daily the number of IPv4 ip addresses left and tells how far is the doomsday. The situation is as critical as of oil, for oil we don’t have a solution but we can easily save the digital doomsday by switching to IPv6.
But it seems the Indian IT industry is either putting deaf ears towards the problem or are trying to run way from the issue due to a large cost associated with the migration from IPv4 to IPv6. To migrate from IPv4 to IPv6 many upgrades need to be done both on hardware and software front ,which is a cause of worry for the ISP’s and service providers.ISP’s have to upgrade their routers, switches, servers, software running on servers which implies huge costs. Companies are experimenting with some alternate solutions and new technologies for eg MTNL is providing dynamic IP even to retail users. It is also taking help of NAT ( Network address translation) so as to use very few public ip addresses. However these workarounds can solve the problem for some time but a permanent solution need to be implemented and the sooner the better as it will degrade the quality and purpose of internet.
According to PK Saji , Senior Vice President (Global Infrastructure operations) Sify “There is no serious work happening on the customer premises equipment (CPE) nor the network side. And if work is not done right now, ISPs and enterprise users will not be able to migrate seamlessly to IPv6,”
As on date Reliance Communications , Bharti Airtel and Sify Technologies are among the few ISP’s who are working towards solving the issue and migrating to IPv6.
It seems it’s a very high time to move towards next generation IP Addressing (IPv6) and plan a migration strategy towards the same before its too late.
I think thr is a problem with 2 links
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
digital doomsday clock
Please update them!
Thanks for pointing out.. its corrected
The digital doomsday clock link dosent seem to be found.
And no mention of dynamic IP’s. Isnt that another way this problem is being currently tackled ?
Thanks for bringing into notice seems something messed up. The link is http://penrose.uk6x.com/.
Dynamic IP concept is widely used and even after its use the problem persist.
IPv6 brings quite a bit more than 16 billion addresses – the standard allocation block is a /48 – which allows up to 65,536 subnets, each of which has 4 billion times the number of addresses in the entire existing IPv4 Internet. There are enough /48 blocks for every human alive to get over 4,000 of them. And that is just what has been released for allocation so far (much more is reserved).
It is not as expensive to migrate as people think – see Cisco’s “Global IP Strategies” for details on Bechtel Corporation’s migration (about 1% of annual IT budget, including migrating 800 applications). They have already more than recovered the cost of migration and can offer powerful new services to customers.
Some vendors are already providing fully compliant dual stack products, with good security. For details, search for “IPv6 Ready” – silver level certification is good for casual work, gold level insures full compliance. The IPv6 Forum’s “IPv6 Ready” product list shows available network gear that is already certified.
Our research shows that IANA will run out of addresses by mid 2010, assuming no panic rush allocations (otherwise sooner). By end of 2010, all RIR’s (e.g. APNIC) will be out. By the time 2011 arrives, the crisis will already be in full swing for organizations that have not already migrated.
IPv6 offers many new capabilties, in addition to restoring the flat address space (getting rid of NAT, which causes MANY problems, and was introduced only to stretch the lifetime of IPv4 address space). It has far superior QoS and multicast, and IPsec works great (due in part to no NAT).
Applications that will benefit most from IPv6 are: VoIP (no NAT traversal required, QoS better), IPTV (QoS better, multicast works), VPNs (IPsec finally works with no NAT), P2P and Massive Multiplayer Gaming.
Even if ISPs are too cheap to convert, you can tunnel IPv6 right over their last generation IPv4 today (“6in4″ or other mechanisms). Soon, ones that don’t offer direct IPv6 service will have trouble keeping customers.
For details, see http://www.ipv6.org and http://www.ipv6forum.org. Our website is http://www.infoweapons.com. We have a secure, dual stack DNS/DNSSEC/DHCP/DHVPv6 server appliance today (SolidDNS), and are about to release dual stack IP PBX (SolidPBX) and dual stack firewall/VPN/tunnel appliance (SolidWall).
Note: the Dynamic IP concept is like NAT: very bad engineering made necessary (until now) due to the lack of enough IPv4 “real” addresses. There are no real advantages of it. With IPv6, all addresses are “static external” – no NAT, no dynamic required.
Thanks Lawrence for such a detailed info
Cheers
Saurabh