Internet address run-out: is it time to panic?

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 01 September 2009 05:23

IT Industry - Strategy

However this allocation decision by ICANN means that Asia Pacific - with 50 percent of the world's population and some of the most rapidly advancing technology nations such as India and China - will get only one fifth of the remaining allocation.

So, if the current rate of address allocation of one block every five weeks were spread evenly across the globe, and had not increased by 2011, APNIC, the RIR for Asia Pacific would get through its block in about 10 weeks - around the end of March 2011.

Commenting on this looming crisis, IPv6 Now chairman, Tony Hill, said: "As a consequence, international discussion of IPv6 has now developed substantial urgency ... International analysis has recently pointed out that large scale NAT [network address translation] solutions will not be able to provide suitable user performance or support next generation communications devices. In addition, shortages of IPv4 addresses will not only affect organisations that don't upgrade, but even those that are planning to use dual stack IPv4/IPv6 systems to transition and grow their networks will face the same problems. Planning for IPv6 should be a major concern of all businesses in Australia and the Asia Pacific."

Reporting from the recent series of IPV6 Hui (conferences) held in New Zealand, IPv6 business manager, Kevin Karp, said: "A key theme repeated by all presenters at the Hui was the importance of the so called 'soft issues' raised by v6 implementation that may not be immediately obvious upon a superficial dual stack implementation of IPv6. Furthermore the difficulty of solving the soft issues was extremely easy to underestimate as was the time required to adequately address them...

"Presenter after presenter emphasised the soft issues (particularly training) as being the real difficulty, consuming most time in the implementation cycle. This led to the other oft-repeated point: Given that the time required to overcome these soft issues was so routinely underestimated it puts special emphasis on the need to start adoption NOW."

Karp concluded: "It was clear that the time for a leisurely transition had passed, and by necessity the task would be more rushed than was desirable. The burden to reduce the complications of a rushed transition was clearly up to the members of the audience. Vint Cerf summarised, 'engineering done in a panic is invariably poor engineering'. His meaning was very clear."