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FOREWORD - Meeting the challenge head-on
In this issue, guest commentator Axel Pawlik, CEO of Regional Internet Registry RIPE NCC, discusses the vital role of IPv6 in the continued development of the Internet
The Internet industry is running out of IPv4 addresses. At some point, probably about three years from now, IANA (the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority), the body responsible for the top-level distribution of IP addresses, will hand out the last unallocated IPv4 addresses. The exact ramifications of this are currently the subject of much discussion and debate, but it is clear that IPv6, the new generation of IP protocol, is vital to the continued growth and development of the Internet. Ensuring that IPv6 is efficiently and effectively deployed is therefore the major challenge facing the Internet today.
As the IPv4 exhaustion date approaches, IP addressing is a global concern. Already, 180 of the 256 IPv4 address blocks of "/8" have been allocated, and of the remaining 76, 35 are reserved for the Internet Engineering Taskforce (IETF). The remaining 41 blocks are held by the IANA for future allocation to the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs). The RIRs, in turn, distribute addresses to ISPs and other users in their respective regions.
The original plan was that as the Internet grew and the IPv4 address pool was depleted, the new protocol, IPv6, would be deployed. According to this plan, the deployment of IPv6 would be complete long before the last IPv4 address was allocated.
This has not happened, and IPv6 deployment activity has, up to this point, been minimal. This is now a real problem, because the transition to IPv6 will now have to take place in that grey area beyond the exhaustion of the IPv4 address pool. Therefore, as the Internet continues to grow, network operators will have to "dual stack", or run both IPv4 and IPv6 simultaneously.
The pace of Internet growth, however, may pose problems for this plan. The RIRs currently allocate approximately 268 million unique addresses every year. This is even as the use of NAT (Network Address Translation, a technology that allow many devices to use the same address) increases. If there are no IPv4 addresses for new users, how will new networks be able to implement dual stack?
Looking at the data collected by the five RIRs, there are some encouraging signs. But when we compare the amount of IPv6 that is actually being routed on the Internet to the amount of routed IPv4 address space, that optimism begins to seem a little misplaced. There are simply not many IPv6 addresses currently on the Internet.
During 2007 and the early part of 2008, however, there has been a significant rise in IPv6 uptake. This is certainly a cause for increased optimism, but the fact remains that, with only three years until the exhaustion of the IPv4 address pool, a dual stack Internet is inevitable, and IT Directors are going to have to be creative.
Ultimately, the RIRs urge that the widespread deployment of IPv6 be made a high priority by all stakeholders.
Governments are key players in Internet growth and we urge them to play their part in the deployment of IPv6, and in particular to lead by example in making content available over the IPv6 Internet.
When business leaders make firm decisions to deploy IPv6, the process is fairly straightforward. Staff must be trained, management tools need to be enhanced, routers and operating systems need to be updated, and IPv6-enabled versions of applications need to be deployed. All of these steps, however, will take time and money.
The RIRs have well established, open and widely supported mechanisms for Internet resource management and we are confident that our Policy Development Process meets and will continue to meet the needs of all Internet stakeholders through the period of IPv4 exhaustion and IPv6 deployment. The immediate challenge lies in making content available via IPv6, and in using the processes and mechanisms already available to ensure that service providers and content providers build adequate experience and expertise to continue to grow and develop the Internet.
www.ripe.net
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