What’s all the IPv6 buzz about? Many companies, bloggers and computer network enthusiasts believe there is a crisis of IP addresses because current protocol IPv4 is 98% allocated and only 2% left unallocated to any company or person. They believe it’s almost similar to Y2K problem that everyone was so afraid of and nothing happened.

First of all, many news outlets are misunderstanding the whole concept of IP addresses and reporting it incorrectly. They claim that 98% is used and only 2% left unused which is incorrect. By ‘used’ a networking professional would understand as the IP address being actually configured to a specific computer or device, active and live on the network. Even if 100% of IPv4 addresses allocated to ISPs which happens this year, it does not mean that all 100% of IPs currently in use. In fact out of all allocated IPv4 addresses only about 3/4 is really used, reused and live on the Internet.

Second, why create a panic and rush everyone to switch to IPv6? Other than marketing by many big corporations and making a lot of money on IPv6 stickers and labels, there is no real technical reason.

IPv6 technology was created couple decades ago so it’s not new to any network hardware manufactures and 100% of all switches and routers on the market today support IPv6. All operating systems support IPv6 as well.

When companies really run out of all their IPv4 reserves they will slowly start using IPv6 as they go. There is no need to actually migrate all IPv4 networks to IPv6 by changing IP addresses on all computers and devices.

IPv4 address is a 32-bit address. There are only 4,294,967,296 IPv4 addresses possible. As an example an IPv4 address looks like 8.8.248.248. It is short, easy to remember and convenient to work with. It is similar to a vanity phone number that we all prefer using when calling our favorite businesses.

IPv6 addresses are 128-bit. An example of such an address is fe80::70cc:dad4:a37d:e26a%13:. This IPv6 is actually active on one of the networks and blocked by firewall so it’s not accessible to the public. All professional computer networks use a static IP address assigned to a particular server. Imagine spelling out that IPv6 address over the phone to a network engineer who is troubleshooting a router in a loud datacenter.

There can be 3,400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 IPv6 addresses. That should be enough for our lifetime, comparing to only 4,294,967,296 that we ran out in 2 decades of Internet growth.

Because there are more than 4 billion computers and other devices that use Internet connection on the planet, IPv4 was not maxed out thanks to a NAT (Network Address Translation) technology that is used by most offices, homes and cell phones. NAT translates external ISP IP address and your internal home address. It creates a home network like 192.168.0.15 and your friend across the city can have the same home IP without conflicting with yours. Two different business or corporate networks can have the same IP 10.10.1.15 on their internal NAT’ed networks and work with no issues. With IPv6 there is no need for NAT and each device on the planet can have its own unique IPv6 address.

There are pros and cons for using IPv4 with NAT and IPv6 without NAT. NAT works almost like a firewall on your home router where you can browse Internet freely, but a hacker will not be able to get into your home computer. With IPv6 and absence of NAT, a hacker will have a direct access to your home computer, so you’d better use hardware or software firewall. Though some might say that IPv6 is more secure because IPsec – a security protocol is built-in and is a requirement on all IPv6 networks, in reality most IPv4 networks are configured to use IPsec in all home and business routers as well.

Some companies advertise that they support IPv6 and force customers to switch as if this is some kind of advantage and outstanding step to be better than the others. But in reality that company was forced to use IPv6 as a desperate move because they ran out of nice IPv4 addresses.

For example, ASPnix Web Hosting supports IPv6. A few paragraphs above IPv6 address is a live sample taken just by pinging one of the servers on the network. But the great news for all ASPnix customers that ASPnix has huge reserves of IPv4 addresses that will last for at least 5 more years. Customers can enjoy using their dedicated IP addresses at ASPnix and remember the nice vanity addresses such as 8.8.248.248 or even 8.8.248.8.

So I hope it’s now clearer what this is all about and eventually we’ll all be using IPv6, but there is absolutely no need to panic and rush to switch from current IPv4 to IPv6 protocol.

Tagged with: FAQ • Internet • IP Address • IP version 6 • IPv4 • IPv6 • NAT • Networking • Protocol • Router • Switch
 

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This entry was posted on Saturday, June 4th, 2011 at 1:38 am and is filed under News, Reviews, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.