Transition from protocol IPv4 to protocol IPv6 is one of the main issues to be discussed at the ICANN international meeting. According to Rod Beckstrom, President of ICANN, remaining IPv4 addresses account for a meager 100 million, which is less than 3% of all the used and reserved IPv4 addresses (over 4 billion). It should be noted that the ICANN and the IANA (the latter is responsible for the Internet addressing policy) resolved this problem as far back as in 2006: all national domains got a certain volume of address space which uses protocol IPv6 and as soon as blank IPv4 addresses exhaust, the regional Internet registries (in Europe – RIPE NCC) are to start allocating new addresses. IPv4 and IPv6 will be used simultaneously. There are 340 282 366 920 938 463 463 374 607 431 768 211 456 IPv6 addresses available (approximately, 340 trillion trillion trillions). This number will fully cover current and future needs of the Internet (for reference – as of late 2010, the global population is slightly less under 7 billion) and all sorts of gadgets - from mobile phones to household electricity counters -will be connected to the Internet.
Literally a week ago, on 30 November 2010, the IANA once again raised this issue and informed about the nearing end of IPv4 addresses in the free-pool. Currently there are only seven slash-eight IPv4 address blocks (net mask 255.0.0.0) which comes to about 2, 73% of all available for use IPv4 addresses. In compliance with the rules, the remaining five address blocks in the pool will be simultaneously allocated among five regional registries (RIR), with just 2 blocks left for the regular IP-address allocation. And though each block numbers about 17 million hosts, it lasts about one month and the pace of assignment keeps growing all the time: a merely two years ago over one billion IPv4 addresses were available.
A great deal of operable equipment used by the Internet operators of very different levels and not supportive of the new protocol remains the main hurdle to transition to protocol IPv6. In other words, the pace of equipment upgrade or its replacement with a modern one does not keep up with IPv4 address allocation and not every operator is ready to make such serious investments in the networks. One of plausible solutions to this problem is a gradual introduction of the new protocol. In this case only boundary routers supporting both versions of the protocol are replaced leaving main equipment intact. These boundary routers ensure connectivity with other IPv6 nets via the IPv4 infrastructure.
Transition to IPv6 is regularly debated at the RIPE NCC meetings. In particular, at the recent Moscow conference held in late September 2010, the RIPE Chair, Rob Blokzijl, made a presentation “IPv4 Interesting Future”, and ascertained that, “IPv4 pool of addresses will run out not later than 17 January 2012 and may be before.” At the same time, Mr. Blokzijl thinks that demand for IPv4 addresses will still be there and will not faze out in the near future. That is why, it’s necessary to pool efforts to solve the challenges associated with the address space and ensure painless and smooth transition to IPv6.
