IPv6 is the next-generation of the web

IPv4 address exhaustion has made the advent of IPv6 inevitable.

By Donna Donnowitz
August 15, 2011
According to a report in Information Week, organizations are beginning to realize that when the IPv4 addresses are completely gone, any business expansion, any new service, any smart device, any additional end-point, anything internet-related will need IPv6 addresses.

The report says the exponential increase in the number of internet connections needed in emerging markets like China, India and Indonesia, means that the pool of 4.3 billion addresses, which is what IPv4, supports, is not enough. In addition, this does not take into account the emergence of a whole new generation of machine-to-machine applications, like smart metering and remote management systems, all of which involve devices connected to the web.

The good news, says the report, is that there is a solution to the problem of IPv4 exhaustion. It has been around since 1998 when the Internet Engineering Task Force announced its specifications for IPv6, the next-generation internet addressing protocol. With 128 bits of addressing space, IPv6 has the ability to provide a theoretical maximum of about 340 trillion, trillion, trillion addresses.

IPv6 does not just tackle the issue of IPv4 address exhaustion, its larger space capabilities also pave the way for improved connectivity and greater flexibility in IP deployments, says the report. In planning a company’s migration to IPv6, an organization should also look to take full advantage of the inherent strengths of IPv6 in order to get the most out of the next-generation Internet.

Many key issues are being taken care of with IPv6, states the report. The new protocol has more than enough addresses to support the end-to-end connectivity needed for emerging applications. IP Security, the protocol for IP network-layer encryption and authentication, is embedded in the base protocol, as is support for multicast. This permits a more efficient way of delivering audio, video or any other data simultaneously to a variety of destinations.

With the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority having allocated the final IP address blocks from the global IPv4 central address pool, and the Asia-Pacific Network Information Center allocating its last address blocks for the region in April, the inevitability of IPv4 exhaustion has finally become a reality. The bottom line is that organizations should start planning for the move to IPv6 now, if they have not already done so, says the Information Week report.

In a recent Network World survey, most companies reported that they will be on IPv6 in less than 18 months.

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