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IP registry goes to Defcon 1 as IPv4 doomsday nears
« on: 2011-04-16 14:25:55 » |
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Talk about a train wreck in slow motion; IPv6 has been on the table for over a decade, "quick look behind you a dwarf with a knife" .... "Plugh" .....
Sigh
Fritz
APNIC activates draconian rationing
Source: The Register
Author: Dan Goodin
Date: 2011.04.15
The provider of IP addresses to the Asia Pacific region has activated a major change in the way it allocates them after becoming the first registry to deplete its number of older addresses to fewer than 17 million.
APNIC said the depletion of all but its final /8 block of addresses was a “key turning point in IPv4 exhaustion” meant that it was no longer able to meet current demand for the older addresses. As a result, the registry has immediately instituted a draconian rationing plan that will limit both the number of IPs issued and the organizations that are eligible to receive them.
Under the new policy, established organizations may receive new numbers for the sole purpose of helping them transition to IPv6, the net's next-generation addressing scheme. And even then, organizations will be eligible to get no more than a /22 block, which comes out to just 1,024 new addresses. New entrants to the internet industry will still be able to receive IPv4 addresses to use natively, but they'll be subject to the same /22-block cap.
“Agreed on by the Asia Pacific internet community, the Final /8 Policy conserves the remaining IPv4 address blocks to support the region’s transition to IPv6,” APNIC officials wrote in a release (PDF here). “Without that block of IPv4 space, new network operators would find it difficult, or impossible, to connect to the internet, even with large IPv6 address allocations available from APNIC.”
The move comes two months after the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority depleted its remaining pool of IPv4 addresses by dividing it up among the various regional registries. Under that move, APNIC received two /8 blocks, suggesting that the Asia Pacific registry has burned up at least 16 million addresses in just eight weeks.
The 32-bit IPv4 system yields some 4 billion unique addresses, a number that seemed large enough when the internet was conceived. With the advent of smartphones and internet-connected security cameras, cars, and other everyday devices, the depletion of older addresses has been forecast for more than a decade. The road to the newer IPv6 system is paved with pain for IT administrators and the end users who depend on them. That in turn has prompted widespread reluctance and procrastination in making the transition.
Already, the pain of APNIC's rationing is being felt. Chinanet Fujian Province Network on Thursday received almost 500,000 IP addresses that were spread into 1,102 separate prefixes. Organizations prefer to have large blocks in as few prefixes as possible so the addresses are easier to organize and identify.
The shortage recently forced Microsoft to spend $7.5 million for 666,624 addresses, which the company purchased from Nortel.
http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/internet/article1702096.ece
Trends of increasing IPv6 uptake across the entire region
It might take a long time, possibly a decade or so, for the remaining part of the IPv4 web address resource pool allotted to the Asia Pacific region to get exhausted, despite the crunch that is being experienced globally.
The IPv4, or Internet Protocol version 4, is an old number-based address system that enables devices to communicate with one another on the Internet. The sets of numbers that could be used as digital addresses started getting exhausted as the Internet grew, necessitating the switch over to a newer protocol called IPv6.
Paul Wilson, Director General of Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), the regional Internet registry that oversees the allocation of web address resources for the region, told The Hindu that APNIC was implementing plans to conserve the remaining stock of IPv4 address resources allotted to this region “well ahead of time.”
APNIC has around 3,000 account holders, with new accounts being added every year.
The Number Resource Organisation (NRO), which oversees the allocation of these resources at the global level, announced in February that its store of unallocated IPv4 address space was fully depleted.
The demand for new address will be met with smaller allocations, to ensure that they last longer even as the world transitions to IPv6. APNIC is into a phased plan to handle this, and is currently approaching the end of phase 2, which will herald a key regional milestone with a major change in the IPv4 allocation policy, said Mr. Wilson, in an email interview.
APNIC does not want members to inflate requests in view of the exhaustion of IPv4 resources. They should factor in IPv6 to meet their long-term requirements and growth expectations.
During phase 3, the aim would be to conserve IPv4 “for as long as possible so there will always be enough space for new organisations to enter the market. This policy also reserves address space for each community member to complete a transition to IPv6.”
“This is a significant development for such a dynamic marketplace as India. India is far from its peak in terms of Internet penetration, both fixed and mobile. Those new entrants need that small delegation of IPv4 space to help their IPv6 networks talk to the IPv4 parts of the Internet,” he said.
“The Indian economy will continue to grow in terms of both IPv4 and IPv6 address delegation in the foreseeable future. The growth in delegations in India from 2008-2010 is approximately 63 per cent,” said Mr. Wilson, when asked about the country's share.
But in the face of dwindling IPv4 resources, the only way out is to switch to IPv6 in the long run. “Our statistics show trends of increasing IPv6 uptake across the entire region, including South Asia, since the introduction of APNIC's Kickstart IPv6 program in February 2010,” he explained.
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