Internet policymakers to announce depletion of the free pool of IPv4 addresses next week
By [Carolyn Duffy Marsan](http://www.networkworld.com/Home/cduffy%20marsan.html), Network World
January 28, 2011 01:53 PM ET
Internet policymakers are expected to announce next week the predicament that they’ve been warning about for years: The pool of available IPv4 addresses is all dried up.
Once all of the IPv4 addresses have been distributed, carriers will only be able to acquire addresses that support the replacement technology, known as IPv6, which is not backward-compatible with IPv4, the current version of the Internet’s main communications protocol.
The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and the Number Resource Organization (NRO) are believed to be preparing an announcement for Thursday that they have handed out all of the remaining IPv4 addresses to the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs).
Related Content
The registries, in turn, will dole out the final blocks of IPv4 addresses to carriers during the next few months. Each registry – including the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) in North America – will be given a block of 16.7 million IPv4 addresses that they will hand out on a first-come, first-serve basis to carriers that demonstrate a need for it.
Within a few months, the five regional registries are expected to run out of their allotments of IPv4 addresses. Industry observers expect the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) to run out first, and AfriNIC, the Registry for Internet Number Resources for Africa, to run out last.
“The depletion of the IANA pool is an important milestone,” says Fred Baker, a Cisco Fellow who chairs the Internet Engineering Task Force’s IPv6 Operations Working Group. “It’s not the end of the line for IPv4 as a business, as the RIRs and their members have a supply to work through for a number of months to come, and the IPv4 Internet will continue to run for years to come. But it is clearly the beginning of the end” for IPv4.
Network operators that don’t move aggressively to support IPv6 on their public-facing Web sites and services will be forced to use complex, expensive translation mechanisms between IPv4 and IPv6 such as carrier-grade network address translation.
THE BASICS: IPv6 Tutorial
Network operators “will make do with translation options while they have to, but the smart money is on IPv6,” Baker adds. "Comcast, Google, Facebook and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=(http://www.networkworld.com/topics/lan-wan.html) in Network World’s LANs & WANs section.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/012811-ipv4-internet-policymakers.html?hpg1=bn
How prepared are you for IPv6?
