The IPv6 age is upon us, and DOTQUAD is ready.

Sun Feb 27, 2011 by Dan Stieglitz

I think my favorite quote coming out of the IPv4 exhaustion news stream is one from Vint Cerf, the "father of the internet," who in an interview with the Sidney Morning Herald gave this pithy reply to questions about why the IPv4 address space is exhausted:

"Who the hell knew how much address space we needed?"

Although comical in tone (at least to me), it's true that there was no way to anticipate the explosive growth of the internet since then. Even if you had correctly predicted what was going to happen, you'd have been labeled crazy long before that label changed to visionary. So approximately 4.2 billion addresses seemed like a reasonable enough number--and since network speed and efficiency was an even greater issue at the time--32 bits per address was a perfectly reasonable number. Every bit needed to be conserved back then. 

Bit conservation was one of the reasons for another, similar issue brewing in the software world eons ago (ok 12 years, but that's eons in internet time). When most major operating systems were designed, years were abbreviated with two digits. The software developers of the 1960s and 70s didn't anticipate much of a problem when the year 2000 rolled by, so two digits seems like a perfectly reasonable solution. While for the most part they were right--it wasn't a huge problem--it spawned the largely wasteful and stress-inducing "Y2K" phenomenon. (Author's note: I'm biased and a bit bitter having been "volunteered" to do Y2K duty at my employer at the time, a major Wall St. bank. And so I was in the office on 12/31/99 at midnight).

Y2K was a media frenzy, and turned out to be a false alarm. Now, however, we are faced with a problem of truly global proportions--and one with real ramifications. The transition of a fundamental internet technology to a new protocol can potentially affect every packet flying through the global network. The difference here is that we (the global technology community) have been prepared for this transition and have been slowly integrating solutions for over 10 years now. There's no hard-and-fast date that we can hit like a brick wall as there supposedly was in 2000. 

As described by DOTQUAD co-founder James Cornman of Atlantic Metro Communications:

A common topic of discussion for a number of years has been the exhaustion of IPv4 address space and the future of the Internet with IPv6. As of February 3, 2011, the available pool of IPv4 addresses has been allocated. The well has run dry. Luckily this was predicted long ago (IPv6 was first proposed in the early 1990s) and we have an alternative. Whats next?

Enter IPv6: The unlikely successor to the Internet’s existing IPv4 protocol [wheres IPv5?], IPv6 offers a more scalable addressing scheme based on eight groupings of hexadecimal values (ex:2001:1980:2:9838:abcd:efff:dead:beef) that allows for some insanely high amounts of host addresses. The amount of available addresses that IPv4 allows (roughly 4.2 billion addresses) pales in comparison to the 340 undecillion (thats 3.4×10³⁸) addresses that IPv6 allows. A rather astounding fact that was thrown around the office today by our own JP Doherty is : IPv4 is to a golf ball as IPv6 is to the Sun. Imagine that.

...Atlantic Metro has been maintaining and expanding its nationwide backbone in a IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack configuration for over 3 years!

Read more at: Atlantic Metro Blog

There will probably be a few hiccups along the way for the internet as a whole, not the least of which is getting humans used to the IPv6 address format which is not like IPv4 at all. Following this transition we should have enough addresses for everyone on the planet to have at least one personal address, one mobile device address and one home computer address.

I'll start to get worried once we need addresses for every organ in our body.