About 15 years ago, an improved Internet Protocol was developed called IPv6. Among the improvements was an vast increase in the number of usable Internet addresses (IP Addresses) because – you know – we were going to run out eventually; and before very long, it seemed at the time.
However, being the ingenious sods that we sometimes are – as a species – we managed to cook up a number of “Plan-B”s to buy us more time in which to act.
And then we took that time, we squandered it, and ultimately we lost it.
There isn’t another Plan B lurking in the wings. There isn’t time, anymore. We took all of the years of extra time that we gained, and used them up by not acting, ensuring that – when the time came – the process would be more difficult, more involved and much bigger than it would have been if we hadn’t come up with a Plan B in the first place.
Go us.
The IANA (who manages the central unallocated IP address pool) is expected to hand out the very last block of IP addresses in the current (IPv4) protocol in just 48 days.
Then they have no more.
Those address blocks are handed out to RIRs (Regional Internet Registries). It is likely that many of the RIRs will have no new IPv4 addresses to give anyone in the next 90-100 days or so. The last RIR with addresses to give out might still have a few left in a year from now, for their own region.
And then there are none left.
For anyone else to get a new IPv4 Address, someone close to them has to give one up. This is completely infeasible. An entire “/8″ block (16 million addresses and change) are used up every 4-6 weeks.
Why have we let this occur? Because it made good, short-term business sense.
As IPv4 addresses started to get much scarcer during the 1990s, the price charged to the customer for providing them went up. In a sense, the ever-increasing cost of fixed IP addresses was just one Plan B, among many. The growth in the allocation rates of new addresses were slowed, and plenty people made huge bags of cash from it all.
The growth in allocation rates didn’t stop, though. More addresses are allocated each week than the week before. The demand is there, despite all the Plan B gimmicks we’ve come up with, like more reliance on NAT and dynamic allocation.
We’ve played all of our cards, used all of our tricks, and wrung every IP address out of every Plan B that we could come up with.
It’s too late now to do anything but to draw up a plan and put it in motion. If you don’t, in just another quarter or two you’ll be increasingly cut off from the chunks of the Internet that did. If your ISP isn’t already providing you with IPv6 prefixes, contact them and ask them why and when. If they don’t have a plan, then you can’t plan to do anything except change providers to somebody that does.
Does Apple still have the address space at 17.0.0.0/8?
…checking….
Yep. They sure do! 16,777,216 IP addresses. About 5 weeks’ supply. One 265th of the global Internet.
Last I looked on December 1 there were only 7 such blocks left, five of which were already pre-allocated to the RIRs for when their current supply was exhausted. Some of those may already have been handed out to the RIRs.
Footnote: If the current allocation rate of IPv4 addresses had held constant since IPv4 first rolled out, we’d have run out of addresses in 2004. All those Plan B schemes gave us a few more years was all.
That gadget from HE in your sidebar claims that 7 are still available.
It’s my understanding that my Cisco router that I bought earlier this year does IPv6 locally but not at the WAN port, which is not much of help. *shrug*
I’m not convinced my (provider-supplied) cable-modem will run IPv6 natively either. Later models will, for sure, and earlier models won’t, definitely. The one I have is somewhere in a limbo between the two.
Eeep! I didn’t know cable modems worked at a high enough level to care about IPv4 vs. IPv6. Well, I was thinking of upgrading to one that can work at DOCSIS 3 speeds…
Thanks for letting me know!
DOCSIS 3.0 includes full IPv6 support. Some (but not all) DOCSIS 2.0 cable-modems can get firmware upgrades that will allow them to handle IPv6 also. Any other cable-modems will need physical replacement.
ObSigh
It’s a huge bill. If my ISP hasn’t been installing IPv6-capable hardware for the last few years, they’re dead.
They needed the time, I think, but it’s something they should have started talking to customers about. Maybe that’s why the previous owners sold out.