Print
Internet’s father Vint Cerf is a little concerned about his beloved child. He has warned that we will soon expend the 4.2 billion IP addresses available under the IPv4 system currently in use. As per his prediction, there might not be any fresh IP addresses left by 2010.
He fears that this will considerably hamper the connectivity of the internet. He has suggested that internet be urgently switched to a new system. That new system is already in use in Japan for linking thousands of earthquake sensors and has been around for almost a decade. The IPv6 as it is called can provide an inexhaustible 340 trillion, trillion, trillion addresses.
Image Credit: Pat (Flicr User )
Comments are closed on this article
horzo
September 29, 2008 at 11:19am
Yawn. This is the next Y2K panic.
There are many ways that the lifetime of the current IPv4 space can be extended. ISPs can use NAT more aggressivly, for instance. Very few broadband consumers need a publically routable address, or would notice if they didn't have one.
If and when it becomes necessary for ISPs and organizations requiring publically routable addrsses to transition to IPv6, they can do so without much drama. I don't think it's going to be all that complicated to hide legacy hosts behind an IPv4 NAT, while still allowing them to route to an IPv6 world.
Keith E. Whisman
September 28, 2008 at 10:44pm
So 340 trillion, trillion, trillion addresses is roughly the same number of stars in the universe?
AndyYankee17
September 29, 2008 at 6:58am
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipv6 read the first paragraph
"...approximately 5×1028 (roughly 295) addresses for each of the roughly 6.5 billion (6.5×109) people alive today."
damicatz
September 28, 2008 at 1:31pm
1.For Windows users, you need at least Vista to use IPv6 properly (XP has experiemental IPv6 support but it's flakey and doesn't work alongside IPv4).
As long as you are using Vista, you don't need to do anything to install IPv6; it's installed by default alongside IPv4.
2.With Vista, IPv4 sites will still work. Your network card will be assigned both an IPv4 address and an IPv6 address. Your computer will first try to find an IPv6 route before using IPv4.
3.The big caveat with IPv6 is that, at this time, there are no consumer level ISPs in North America (at least, to my knowledge) that support IPv6. That means you won't get an IPv6 internet address; the IPv6 address you'll get in Vista will be a local IPv6 address (IPv6 has a mechanism for automatically generating a unique local address for every network card without a DHCP server called link-local addressing). Your ISPs DNS servers may also not support IPv6 (though most should at least return the v6 address at this point in time).
That means that, in order to access the few IPv6 websites that are on the internet, you have to tunnel by encasing the IPv6 packet in an IPv4 packet. There are a few ways to do this but none of them are ideal solutions. I know that, for example, uTorrent supports IPv6 and that I've actually been able to connect to other peers using Toredo IPv6 tunneling but it still uses IPv4 packets on the outside.
yogurt80
September 28, 2008 at 9:01am
I want to see 340 trillion, trillion, trillion displayed in binary.
FrancesTheMute
September 30, 2008 at 5:05pm
00110011 00110100 00110000 00100000 01110100 01110010 01101001 01101100 01101100 01101001 01101111 01101110 00101100 00100000 01110100 01110010 01101001 01101100 01101100 01101001 01101111 01101110 00101100 00100000 01110100 01110010 01101001 01101100 01101100 01101001 01101111 01101110
AndyYankee17
September 28, 2008 at 5:52am
this is hardly news. big networking organizations do not want to switch from ipv4, the invested heavily into it and don't want to lose thier investment. meanwhile pretty much the entire general public who understands networking wants ipv6. firefox by default tries to usee ipv6 and when it can't it uses ipv4. people can install ipv6 into windows if they want and to see if they are connected to the internet over ipv6 they can visit kame.net. if you see a dancing turtle you got ipv6
winmaster
September 28, 2008 at 1:20pm
How do you install ipv6, and will ipv4 websites still work if I do.
Vegan
September 28, 2008 at 11:59am
So they should make IPv4 for business use, and IPv6 for personal use. Problem solved (unless the amount of companies in the world are way more than I thought).
mitpatterson
September 28, 2008 at 3:13pm
THen under your plan, would buisness websites that people(for personal use)want to access, would that be v6 or v4. Also what if you have a homebased major buisness than which one?
mitpatterson
FoamysKing
September 28, 2008 at 3:51pm
the biggest issue is that next year verizon and att will start using LTE for their 4g technology and it it is directly ip based so allphones will have better data speeds so its seding voice over data instead of sending data over voice but this also means all phones will need an ip address thats why ipv4 is screwed no matter what
