IPv4 Will Go On For Twenty Years

Today, the last IPv4 addresses have been issued to regional authorities, but it will take five to ten years before they are issued to service providers and users, and twenty years before the Internet has properly moved to the new IPv6 protocol, officials said today.

On Monday, two blocks of IPv4 addresses were issued to the Asia Pacific Internet registry APNIC, which triggered a rule under which the last five blocks would be given to the five regional registries. The global authorities no longer have any IPv4 addresses left, precipitating a need to move to IPv6 – although the transition will be orderly, according to a joint press conference held today by the Internet’s main governing bodies.

A grim future without IPv6

“There is no imminent danger,” said Olaf Kolkman, chair of the Internet Architecture Board (IAB). “The Internet will remain working as it did yesterday. The danger is in the possibilities and opportunities that will exist in say a decade or a decade from now.”

IP addresses are unique identifiers made up of four numbers each, allowing computers to communicate with each other around the world. Version 4 of the Internet protocol (IPv4) supports around 4.3 billion addresses, but they are being used up fast by mobile devices and surging demand for connections.

IPv6, the “next generation” has been in development for nearly 20 years, and “nobody was caught off guard by this,” said Rod Beckstrom, president of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

Beckman, Kolkman, and executives from the Number Resource Organisation and the Internet Society, stressed that users would see no difference right now, but if organisations fail to move to IPv6, the future of the Internet would be more limited.

“We have an end-to-end network, with permissionless innovation,”  said Kolkman. “If we move away from that, because reaching each other by IPv4 end-to-end becomes very difficult, there will still be an Internet but it will be very different.  It will be very hard to make Skype phone calls and do file sharing.  Move to IPv6, and all those beautiful things remain possible.”

An IPv4 black market?

Though the last blocks of IPv4 addresses have now been given to the regional registries (RIRs), it will be some time before they are all handed out to users, and fears have been raised that there may be panic buying and a possible black market.

“It is entirely in the RIRs’ hands,” said Beckstrom, arguing that there would be little of this sort of activity. “We have done our jobs… and the IPv4 addresses remaining in the poll will be allocated according to the rules of each region.”

To meet the demand for backward compatibility, some regional authorities will issue small blocks of 1,000 addresses widely, so anyone who wants can have IPv4 addresses – although such small blocks are “only useful for ensuring the transition to IPv6, not for conventional IPv4 deployment,” the conference was told.

IPv6 addresses have been available since 1999, and 8 June this year will see a ‘World IPv6 Day’, a test flight, in which tech giants Facebook, Google and Yahoo will all will enable IPv6 on their main services and content delivery networks Akamai and Limelight Networks, will all attempt to motivate organisations across the industry to prepare their services for the imminent transition.

“It’s only a matter of time before the RIRs and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) must start denying requests for IPv4 address space. Deploying IPv6 is now a requirement, not an option,” added NRO chair Raul Echeberria.