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APNIC, which doles out Internet Protocol addresses in the Asia-Pacific region, got two of the remaining seven blocks of 16.8 million IPv4 addresses from central authority IANA.Yesterday marked an important step toward the end of Internet plumbing as we know it.
Specifically, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) allocated two of the last seven blocks of Net addresses that use today's Internet Protocol verision 4 (IPv4). That will trigger the automatic distribution soon of the last five, one each to the five regional Internet registries (RIR) that oversee the distribution of the numbers farther downstream, to the Internet service providers and other companies that actually need the IPv4 addresses
IP addresses are required for one computer to send data to another over the Internet. IPv4 allows for 4.3 billion addresses--2 to the 32nd power--but its successor, IPv6, allows 340 undecillion--2 to the 128th power, a vastly higher number. To be precise, 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,45 6 addresses.
That new capacity excites network engineers, mobile phone carriers, and others running into IPv4 limits--but unfortunately the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 is a difficult one, because the two communication protocols are incompatible.
Experts expect a years-long transition to move fully to IPv6. During that time, Web site operators, Internet service providers, and others will have to gradually shift infrastructure from handling one protocol to handling both.
IPv4 address exhaustion drives this expensive transition. ISPs have long handled IPv4 constraints by sharing addresses dynamically among customers, and private networks can use a technology called network address translation (NAT) to share a single IP address among multiple computers. But the limits are worse for those who need fixed IPv4 addresses--a company launching a new Web site, for example.
IANA hands out IPv4 addresses in blocks of 16.8 million slash-eights, or /8s. That may sound like a lot of addresses, but in 2010, the RIRs went through 19 such blocks of them. That means that any efforts to conserve or redistribute remaining IPv4 addresses postpones the inevitable rather than fundamentally fixes the shortage. And some stopgap measures, such as "carrier-grade NAT" offered at the larger scale of an Internet service provider, can limit some Net services and impose bottlenecks.
Some companies that got involved in the Internet early own entire /8s themselves and therefore have lots of unused IPv4 addresses--Hewlett-Packard got a second through its acquisition of Compaq, for example. Others with a /8 to themselves include the U.S. Postal Service, airline operations support company SITA, Prudential Securities, pharmaceutical giants Merck and Eli Lilly, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, IBM, Apple, Xerox, AT&T, Level 3 Communications, General Electric, Ford Motor Company, and Halliburton.
The two slash-eights were distributed to Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), the RIR for the Asia-Pacific region.
To give the world a chance to wrestle the IPv6 bull directly by the horns, the Internet Society is helping to organize the World IPv6 Day. On June 8, content providers such as Google and Yahoo and content distributors such as Akamai and Limelight Networks will offer their services over IPv6 for 24 hours for a collective evaluation and troubleshooting session.
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