Q&A: Why switch to IPv6?

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Fewer than 10 per cent of IPv4 addresses are still available, and they're set to run out by 2012, according to the Number Resource Organisation (NRO).

IPv4 is the internet protocol numbering system currently in use, but it's set to run out of numbers within in the next two years. There's a new system in place - IPv6 - but businesses haven't been switching over quickly enough.

We spoke to Axel Pawlik, chairman of the NRO, to find out more.

What’s the issue with IPv4?

In about two years time we will be running out of IPv4 addresses. The fact that the four billion addresses we have there are quite finite was known from the start, when the internet started to happen in the late 70s and early 80s.

It was not really expected that it would be such a smashing success, as it currently is. It was thought to be a tool for scientists and computer geeks. Now, obviously, that has changed.

We currently see on average two IPv4 numbers per head in the more developed world. Now that there are so many billion people in the world, if you were to interpolate that up, there are just not enough IPv4 addresses for everybody.

And it’s not just per head. Every person has pockets full of gadgets, and we have our fridge at home and our TV, and so many other computer-like things, it’s not going to last.

How long do we have until they run out?

Currently we think the IPv4 addresses we will give out until sometime in 2012. That’s based, of course, on a bit of guesswork and interpolation on what we knew about previous allocation rates.

That might change. We might get one or two bigger requests that we currently don’t foresee, and then we might run out a little bit earlier.

So what's IPv6? How does that solve the problem?

In the 90s, the engineers thought about a way around this, and they called it IPv6. That’s version six of the protocol. It’s basically the same function, just more addresses. Many many more addresses…

The idea was many, many years ago that everyone would pick up this new version and would run that, and if everybody has it running, then we would be able to dump the IPv4 stuff because nobody would need it anymore.

But that was based on the assumption that people would actually pick it up quickly. That hasn’t happened, and now we are coming to a crunch… the growth rate is quite high, and now we must adopt IPv6…

If we don’t act relatively rapidly, over the next couple of months, start doing something in earnest, what will happen is that the internet might either not grow as fast as it used to - which is not nice as you want to hook up new people all the time - or there is the quite real danger of added complexity and added costs. And, in the end, also [the] added risk of failure.

Are there other reasons why we should be switching to IPv6, aside from running out of numbers?

That is the main reason. There is no great added functionality to IPv6, apart from just having more addresses. We have to – if we run out of bread, we should eat rice.

But some people say IPv6 offers more security. Is that not true?

It’s not true, really. Basically, all the security you can get with IPv6, you can now have with IPv4. It’s not exciting to go to IPv6. There are no new games, no killer application that runs with IPv6. It’s infrastructure, it’s good housekeeping. Proofing for the future.

Is anyone leading the way with this? Are businesses or government doing better?

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