A number of articles have appeared in the press recently about the world having almost run out of IP addresses under the current IPv4 system.
Each machine – PC, phone, printer, traffic light, etc – which accesses the internet is given a unique number: its IP address. The last blocks of these numbers have now been assigned, although New Zealanders are unlikely to see any obvious effects for some months.
The SMC went to a number of internet experts in New Zealand to ask them what IPv4 is, how it works, what will replace it now that IP addresses are running out, and why the matter is so important.
1) What is the IPv4 protocol? When was it developed, and what is its purpose? How long have we known about the coming IP address shortage?
Andy Linton, Teaching Fellow, School of Engineering and Computer Science at Victoria University of Wellington, comments:
“IPv4 was first developed in mid 1970s, it came into production on the ARPANET on Jan 1 1983. The ARPANET evolved into the Internet during the 80s and 90s. The massive growth in the Internet was sparked by the invention of the protocols which support the WWW by Tim Berners Lee in the early 1990s. IPv4 was originally referred to as simply IP (Internet Protocol)
More details here.
“Its purpose is to transfer packets of data between co-operating computers – it underpins everything, the web, Facebook, Twitter, Skype….
“How long have we known about the coming IP address shortage? Since the early 1990s – some steps were taken to slow down the consumption of addresses but it was clear that a crisis lay ahead some time after 2000.”
Jay Daley, CEO of the NZ Registry Service, comments:
“Each device that connects to the Internet, whether its a desktop computer, a mobile phone or a printer, has to have a unique address assigned to it so that it can communicate with other devices and a set of rules about how it packages up the data that it wants to send and how it unwraps the data sent to it. IPv4 is the set of rules (the protocol) that covers all of this.
“It was invented in 1974 and developed through to 1980 when the version we call IPv4 was finalised. The two inventors, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn who were two academics funded by the US Department of Defense.
“The thing that makes IPv4 so different from previous network protocols and the reason it now dominates is that it splits data up into packets and delivers those packets individually, one hop at a time. The best analogy is with the postal service – imagine splitting up a long letter into lots of postcards and sending them all of individually. Some might get delayed at the post office for day, they might arrive at different times and out of order, but the person who gets them can still put the message together and if one postcard is missing they can always ask for another copy of just that, rather than the whole message. When it was developed, networks were much less reliable than today and this store-and-forward packet protocol was exactly what was needed to use those networks without fuss.”
Professor Brian Carpenter, of the Department of Computer Science, University of Auckland, comments:
“The Internet Protocol, usually abbreviated IP, is the most basic mechanism of all in the Internet. All types of Internet traffic are split up into short packets of data for transmission across the network; IP is the set of rules that must be obeyed to send a single packet from source to destination. We speak of IP version 4 (IPv4) because that is the version, defined in the late 1970s, that is mainly used today. IPv4 was designed when there were just a few thousand computers on the Internet, but it allows for almost four billion numeric addresses. In the 1970s, nobody expected the Internet to grow to the point where it could run out of addresses. However, by about 1990 the Internet was growing rapidly, so the first technical study on this topic took place in 1992. Ever since, we have known that all the available IPv4 addresses would eventually be handed out.”
Dean Pemberton, Senior Consultant at Prophecy Networks, trustee for the New Zealand Network Operators Group Trust and Chair of the Technical Special Interest Group of the NZ IPv6 Taskforce, comments:
“IPv4 is the underlying protocol which enables communication on the Internet. Every email you’ve ever sent, evey webpage you’ve ever looked at has been transmitted using the IPv4 protocol between two IPv4 addresses.
“Wikipedia isn’t a bad reference here. Essentially Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn invented IPv4 out of Stanford and ARPA (then DARPA) in the US.
“[We’ve known about the upcoming shortage] for a while now. Again from Wikipedia:
“”IPv6 was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to deal with the long-anticipated IPv4 address exhaustion, and is described in Internet standard document RFC 2460, published in December 1998.”
“There hasn’t however always been a great deal of agreement on when it was going to run out. There has been a lot denial.
“For example in this article http://news.cnet.com/2100-1028_3-1020653.html it states that ‘He said that around five blocks of “slash eight,” or /8, addresses are consumed worldwide each year’, well we’re allocating 25 /8s of addressing per year now and Paul Wilson (quoted in the article) recently stood on stage and received the last /8 from IANA.
“The Internet is growing faster and faster. We always knew IPv4 was going to run out, we just may have underestimated when.
“The following graph is from a website by Geoff Huston (Chief Scientist at APNIC). It tracks how the IPv4 exhaustion date has changed over time. Ignore the last spike, but you can see that there have been times, even in 2010 when we thought we had 3 more years left.”
Jamie Baddeley, Vice President of InternetNZ and GM, Southern Region of FX Networks, comments:
“The IPv4 protocol is a system designed to provide an address or identifier to any machine connecting to a network that is designed according to Internet Engineering Taskforce (IETF) principles.
“It is, was and will continue to be the mechanism that we use to connect to a distributed computing system known as the Internet, a global network of networks. IPv4 could be considered phase 1 of the Internet.
“A really important moment for this phase was started in 1973 when Vint Cerf (aka TCP) and Robert (Bob) Kahn (aka Ethernet) started by drafting a paper describing their network design, titled “A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection“, which they distributed at a special meeting of the INWG at Sussex University in September, 1973, and then finalized and published in the IEEE Transactions of Communications Technology, in May, 1974. In 1981 the Internet Protocol (i.e IPv4) as we know it now, saw the light of day via RFC791.
“For more history of the origins of the Internet, refer here.
“We have known about a finite limit to IPv4’s capacity for some time. But, at the time of design no one could believe we’d need more than roughly 4 billion addresses.
“IPv6 saw the light of day around 1998.
“So we’ve known about the finite capacity of IPv4 problem since ’74 and we’ve developed a sense of the solution in ’98. Since ’98 we’ve been refining things and waiting for a moment where folks saw a necessity to implement IPv6.
“That time has come.”
2) What is IPv6? Why is it necessary? Why do we need more IP addresses?
Andy Linton, Teaching Fellow at the School of Engineering and Computer Science, Victoria University of Wellington, comments:
“The original protocol was designed in the 1970s and the enormous success of the Internet was simply not envisaged. The maximum number of addresses available is 2^32 or 4294967296. There are a number of reasons why all of these can’t be used but even if they could with over 6 billion people where many of them want several devices, computer, phone, ipad etc we’ve effectively used the IPv4 addresses up (almost).
“IPv6 was designed as a replacement in 1995 and has a very much larger address space, 2^128.”
Jay Daley, CEO of the NZ Registry Service, comments:
“When IPv4 was developed the inventors had to decide how many digits long the unique address could be and that would then be baked into the protocol. The length they chose allowed for just over 4 billion.
“We actually passed the four billion addresses in use some years ago, but due to clever reuse of some special address, it looks like we still have a short while to go before they are all used up. When that happens then any new device cannot have an address and cannot communicate with the other devices.
“IPv6 gets around this by increasing the number of address by a power of four – so now around 3.5 undecillions (see here), which is more than anyone believes will be needed for quite some time.”
Professor Brian Carpenter, of the Department of Computer Science, University of Auckland, comments:
“IP version 6 (IPv6) is a replacement for IPv4 developed since 1994, whose main importance is that it allows for vastly more addresses than IPv4. Technically, it uses 128 bits per address, whereas IPv4 only uses 32 bits per address. IPv6 has other technical improvements too, but addressing is the most important point.
“Four billion addresses simply isn’t enough for the world of nine or ten billion people we expect by mid-century. Especially as mobile phones become Internet access devices, we need a lot more addresses than there are people. At the moment, we are muddling through by sharing addresses – for example, if a household has several computers on a wireless network, they will all share the same address on their connection to an ISP. But address sharing is only a short term measure; just as with telephones, every device needs its own IP address. IPv6 is the only way to do this.”
Dean Pemberton, Senior Consultant at Prophecy Networks, trustee for the New Zealand Network Operators Group Trust and Chair of the Technical Special Interest Group of the NZ IPv6 Taskforce, comments:
IPv6 is a new version of the Internet Protocol. It uses a much larger number of addresses. This isn’t the first time that human history has had to do this sort of adjustment. I remember back when my parents had a 4 digit phone number. Then a 5 digit one, then 6…
“Now they have a 7 digit one (the last 4 digits are the same).
“The reason for this is essentially the same. Because of the update of the technology, you run out of addresses to give them.
“IPv4 uses 2^32 addresses (4,294,967,296 addresses) . When you think that every computer, every smart phone, every Internet connected device needs one of these numbers… Well that was a lot in 1974 when they had two hosts, but it’s not all that many now.
“IPv6 uses 2^128 addresses. Thats 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses. Or if you’d prefer…
“Three hundred forty undecillion, two hundred eighty-two decillion, three hundred sixty-six nonillion, nine hundred twenty octillion, nine hundred thirty-eight septillion, four hundred sixty-three sextillion, four hundred sixty-three quintillion, three hundred seventy-four quadrillion, six hundred seven trillion, four hundred thirty-one billion, seven hundred sixty-eight million, two hundred eleven thousand, four hundred fifty-six.
“So we think it will be ok for a while yet.”
Jamie Baddeley, Vice President of InternetNZ and GM, Southern Region of FX Networks, comments:
“What is it? Next phase of the Internet. The Internet keeps growing and we can’t continue to provide an address or identifier to the avalanche of devices and things that want to connect to the Internet using IPv4. We need it because the resources of IPv4 have been exhausted, and we need to move to the next phase of the Internet.
3) Why haven’t we already adopted IPv6?
Andy Linton, Teaching Fellow at the School of Engineering and Computer Science, Victoria University of Wellington, comments:
“Inertia, lack of knowledge, think how we behave to the messages about climate change, peak oil etc.
“Of course some of us have adopted it.”
Jay Daley, CEO of the NZ Registry Service, comments:
“Mainly because IPv4 still works and until very soon they are still available. So there is not much pressure to change.”
Professor Brian Carpenter, of the Department of Computer Science, University of Auckland, comments:
“Basically because ISPs have been waiting until they had no choice.”
Dean Pemberton, Senior Consultant at Prophecy Networks, trustee for the New Zealand Network Operators Group Trust and Chair of the Technical Special Interest Group of the NZ IPv6 Taskforce, comments:
“The flippant answer is because we were busy doing other things.
“It’s a bit of a catch22. The reason that we need IPv6 is because the Internet is so sucessfull. The reason it’s successful is because everyone is out there busy building new parts of it. They havn’t wanted to slow down and figure out what this IPv6 thing is because up until now IPv4 has been working fine.
“I’ve heard people say that if they stopped and tried to understand a new protocol, that they would lose their advantage over their competitors in the market (which is sometimes measured in weeks or months). They don’t want to mess with something which is working.
“The problem is… We know that at some stage it’s not going to keep working.”
Jamie Baddeley, Vice President of InternetNZ and GM, Southern Region of FX Networks, comments:
4) What will the consequences be, potentially, of not having made the switch yet?
Andy Linton, Teaching Fellow at the School of Engineering and Computer Science, Victoria University of Wellington, comments:
“We need to talk about adding IPv6 to what we do. The word ‘switch’ is completely inappropriate. We will be using both IPv4 and IPv6 for some time. Compare this with the transition from Analogue to Digital Mobiles. They coexisted for some time and eventually Digital prevailed. The analogy is not perfect of course – IPv4 computers can’t talk directly to IPv6 computers. The solution is for computers to be configured to be “dual-stacked” (think bilingual!)
“The IPv4 network will continue to work – don’t panic!
“But we’ll soon start to get to the situation when new connections to the Internet are more likely to be connected on IPv6 only.”
Jay Daley, CEO of the NZ Registry Service, comments:
“We all expect there to a massive growth in the number of devices that connect to the Internet, from mobile phones to street lights. These are all going to require an address and soon they will start to get IPv6 addresses as those are the only ones available. This will then have to be supported by service provides ensuring their systems can be reached by these devices.
“If you’ve not made the switch yet then at the moment you won’t notice much but over time there will be an increasing part of the Internet that you can’t connect to. It may be service providers that you are interested in connecting to or clients that you would like to come to you. This will undoubtedly start slowly but, as with all new technology takeup, it will accelerate rapidly when momentum builds.
“If you leave it to then, then you’ve left it to late because the move to IPv6 is not trivial.”
Professor Brian Carpenter, of the Department of Computer Science, University of Auckland, comments:
“The world will not end. There’s time to add IPv6 support over the next year or two, and there is no hurry whatever about switching off IPv4. The idea has always been for the two solutions to operate in parallel. For example, a web server should be set up to handle both IPv4 and IPv6 connections. Thus, it doesn’t matter whether a client connects using the old or the new solution.”
Dean Pemberton, Senior Consultant at Prophecy Networks, trustee for the New Zealand Network Operators Group Trust and Chair of the Technical Special Interest Group of the NZ IPv6 Taskforce, comments:
“In order to understand the consequences, we need to take a look at what the problem is. In a perfect world, every device on the internet would have a unique IP address. When you wanted to talk to someone else, you’d look up their address and give them a call.
“As before, this analogy looks a lot like phone numbers. If I want to call you, I look up your number, pick up the phone and give you a call. Lets imagine that we’re living in my parents age and we only have 4 digit phone numbers. That gives me 10,000 unique phone numbers to call. I can pick up the phone, call any of these numbers and be connected directly to that person.
“As long as there are only 10,000 people who want to use a telephone that works great. But what happens when more people want phones?
“Well, then it gets messy. If I want to stay with the current phone number protocol (4 digits) then I can’t just dial anyone’s number directly anymore. If I want to talk to someone outside of my 10,000 range, then I have to call the operator and have them connect me. I lose the ability to connect to people directly any more.
“Imagine then that some part of the world decided that they were going to move to a 7 digit system. They would allocate numbers from that range and give people back the ability to have their own unique number again. That might be great for them, but how would I talk to them from my 4 digit system? Again I’d be going through the operator to place the call. That might be ok if I never want to talk to anyone outside my local area. But what if I was a business and I wanted my customers in 7 digit land to be able to phone me? Then I have a problem.
“This is a lot like IPv4 and IPv6.
“We’ve been running out of IPv4 addresses for a while now and people have been hiding hundreds (and sometimes thousands of individual machines behind a single IPv4 address, in order to make the go further. This is called Network Address Translation or NAT. None of these machines get a globally unique address and they all require the equivilent of an ‘Operator’ before they can talk to anyone else outside their local network. A lot of the new Internet technologies do not work well with NAT (Voice and Video chat, Peer to Peer file sharing are two examples)
“Moving to IPv6 gives you the ability to hand out addresses to each device on your network again. This means that they can communicate directly with other devices on the internet. And more importanly if you’re a business, the IPv6 devices of your client’s can communicate with you.”
Jamie Baddeley, Vice President of InternetNZ and GM, Southern Region of FX Networks, comments:
“It depends on who you communicate with globally and the value associated with that. Folks that are purely domestically focussed, not so much. Those vital folks – the ones who manage export – crucial. Foreign markets will make the switch before we do. So export (or internationally) focussed organizations will need to think that IPv6 is mission critical. Imagine not gaining some major contracts because a message could not go through because of IPv4/IPv6 issues? Terrible (not to mention expensive). It’s just a matter of time before the consequences are felt. And depending on who you communicate with, that time could be this year or some day further out. How big is the impact of not being able to access critical scientific data when other countries can? Not being able to reach information when others can is an intellectual disadvantage that can be avoided.”
5) What should people/companies/organisations do to make the switch?
Andy Linton, Teaching Fellow at the School of Engineering and Computer Science, Victoria University of Wellington, comments:
“Individuals need to ask their ISPs, companies need to talk to their IT teams etc.”
Some more links:
New Zealand Government Agencies and IPv6
APNIC: Kickstart your IPv6
APNIC statement: IPv6 Activity Increases as IPv4 Exhaustion Reaches Critical Milestone
Jay Daley, CEO of the NZ Registry Service, comments:
See here for a guide for what enterprises can do.
Professor Brian Carpenter, of the Department of Computer Science, University of Auckland, comments:
- “Consumers and small businesses should get in the habit of asking their suppliers of IT equipment, software and services when IPv6 support will be available. And if the reply is “There’s no demand for it”, your reply should be “I’m demanding it!”
- Any organisation or business that depends on networked IT services should be ensuring that staff, from technicians up to CIOs and CFOs, are educated about IPv6. Ask the question “When will our customer base be trying to access our services via IPv6?” Plan accordingly. And of course, warn all IT suppliers that your next call for tenders will require IPv6 support.
- Any organisation or business that provides networked IT services should already be educated about IPv6 at all levels – if not, this is urgent to fix. You should have a deployment plan in place – skills training, technical scenario, addressing plan, equipment and software upgrade plan, operational procedures, security plan, etc.
“Timing is everything. Support IPv6 too soon, and you waste money. Support IPv6 too late, and you lose customers. Now that the central registry has run out of IPv4 addresses, we expect the regional Internet registries to run out in a year or two, and very large ISPs, especially mobile service providers, to move heavily into IPv6 on the same timescale. This may not happen within New Zealand for quite some time, but it will happen in the USA and China. Therefore, the timing for a given organisation or business depends on its customer base.”
Dean Pemberton, Senior Consultant at Prophecy Networks, trustee for the New Zealand Network Operators Group Trust and Chair of the Technical Special Interest Group of the NZ IPv6 Taskforce, comments
“Take some time and assess their needs. The path to IPv6 is not the same for everyone. Everyone will also have a different timeline. Start talking to the people you trust to give you technical advice. That might be the guy at the computer store if you’re an individual. It might be a professional services company if you’re a large organisation. Start asking them advice about IPv6 and don’t take “You don’t need it” as an answer.
“If they give you that answer then ask them…
“”What happens when my daughter moves to IPv6 and wants to email me from her hotel in Japan?”
“”What happens when my customers in China want to connect to me from their mobiles?”
“Get them to give you a roadmap.
Jamie Baddeley, Vice President of InternetNZ and GM, Southern Region of FX Networks, comments:
“Ask your provider if they support IPv6. If they don’t, then consider the impact of leaving them because staying with them won’t help growth. Ask your network integrator whether they have a plan to support the next phase of the Internet. If both of them have a good plan to support IPv4/IPv6 (also known as dual stack) then run with them. Check out ipv6.org.nz for more information. That has information about providers who have a clue in terms of the next phase of the Internet.”