Crunch time for upgrade of internet addresses that are running out

IPv6 Forum Australia president Michael Biber (left) says businesses have been reticent to switch to Internet Protocol version 6, a situation that APNIC chief scientist Geoff Huston (right) calls a "textbook market failure". Photo: Rodger Cummins, APNIC, Primus Telecom

It is brimming with more than 4.29 billion websites and addresses for networks, mobile phones, refrigerators and, of course, personal computers at home and at work.

The internet

As with anything that exists on the internet, anything connected to the internet and anything transported across the internet, an address is required — called an IP (internet protocol) address — that acts like a phone number, allowing every individual device, piece of data or location to be found in the digital labyrinth.

But the existing 32-bit internet routing system, Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4), is only capable of hosting 4,294,967,296 addresses. So, when the remaining global pool of some 204 million addresses runs out, as is expected before June, no new devices or websites will be able to connect — unless they've transitioned to IPv6, the latest 128-bit incarnation of Internet Protocol, which can store up to a whopping 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 (or 2^128) addresses.

"Of course, they couldn't have predicted what would happen with mobile phones and VoIP and social networking, or that we'd use up addresses as fast as we have."

Mr Biber says that though the IPv6 Forum has been working on the transition for more than a decade, businesses around the globe have been reticent — until now — to exploit their efforts.

Breakdown is inevitable

A breakdown is inevitable. It won't be immediate and it won't be dramatic but it will happen, slowly and subtly, as little bits, mostly the newer IPv6 bits of the internet, fail to appear to anyone still using IPv4 architecture.

The IPv4 internet and all the devices and sites we're accessing now will still work exactly as they do now but when IPv6 devices and sites start appearing online, the existing IPv4 infrastructure simply won't be capable of recognising them and small, random pockets of the new internet will be inaccessible by older hand-helds, routers, modems, servers and operating systems.

The internet and

Nobody owns the internet and, technically, nobody runs it. It is a hotch-potch collection of billions of networks and connections and machines all based loosely on protocols defined by ad hoc bodies with no official power to do anything, really.

That means all internet users have to take matters into their own hands and upgrade their own points of connection — from the ISPs who need to upgrade their servers to host IPv6-compatible websites and the vendors who need to upgrade their mobile handsets, to mums and dads who may require new modems, wireless routers and IPv6-compatible mobile handsets.

"There are a number of ways to calculate the transitional costs for IPv6," Mr Huston says. "One way is to take the internet's 1.7 billion users globally and guesstimate about $100 per user for new hardware, which adds to $170 billion.

In Australia, the internet service provider Internode has led the IPv6 transition, trialling IPv6 with customers for more than a year after deploying it internally in 2007.

Anyone purchasing new hardware or software that has any sort of internet connection should ask if it is v6-capable, because most modems and routers on the market are not and those devices that are can be costly.

Similarly, anyone signing up for a new internet or mobile phone plan, particularly the two-year plans, should ask the same questions.

Is your new hardware (back-end and the devices being deployed in your home or business) IPv6-capable and, if not, will it be upgraded — and at what cost to you?

"I'm confident that the basic IPv6 protocol will still be around in 20 years, though I think the internet will be quite different."

DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), an agency of the US Department of Defense, implemented IPv5 in the 1980s for a streaming internet protocol but it was a research experiment that is now redundant.