Internet Address Exhaustion

Published on Wednesday, 19 January 2011 12:04

Written by JP Reis

Internet addresses are changing in 2011 as the 32bit codes of IP version 4 (IPV4) run out.

JP Reis founder and CEO Greg Collins looks at the history behind this and considers the implications for your business.

IP is ubiquitous right? IPV4 Address Exhaustion.

Type ‘IP ubiquitous’ into Google and you get over a million hits but IP addresses as we know them have almost run out.  The central body, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), expect to issue the last IPV4 address range on or around Valentine’s Day 2011, the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) will issue the last address space to a customer around Halloween 2011.  Let’s consider the history of this and what it means.During the 90s the popular concept was that every electric device from your fridge to your toaster would have an IP address.  Although the Internet connected fridge never really took off, smartphones and tablets certainly have.  The resultant explosion of IP addresses is far beyond the density envisioned when IPV4 was brought into operation way back in 1981.

IPV6

Even back then, as IP won the protocol war and all services began to migrate to IPV4, it became clear that address space wouldn’t be adequate. To remediate this, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) developed version six of the Internet Protocol (IPV6) which was announced in 1998. IPV6 did much more than just increase the address size; it also changed, simplified and secured many aspects of the protocol.

Networked Devices

Meanwhile, in order to alleviate the address space crunch, a process called Network Address Translation (NAT) was developed in the mid-nineties. Any networked device including computers, servers and printers requires an IP address to connect to its local area network but it doesn’t necessarily require a link to the internet.  The IP addresses for the items that don’t are known as “private” addresses.  NAT is used to facilitate a technique called Network Masquerading whereby an entire space of private addresses can hide behind a single, “public” address. NAT has been so widely adopted that the majority of public IPV4 addresses are used in the Internet and the exhaustion of this address space was put off for decades and consequently, the adoption of IPV6 has been far slower than expected.

IP Exhaustion

Clearly NAT was only delaying the inevitable IP exhaustion and that day has now come.  The time remaining to IPV4 exhaustion is not sufficient for the industry to move entirely to IPV6. There are several techniques that can allow IPV4 and IPV6 to Interoperate but they remain controversial and none can solve all of the issues. David Conrad, the general manager of IANA, acknowledges: "I suspect we are actually beyond a reasonable time frame where there won't be some disruption. Now it's more a question of how much."

So do we fall out of love with the Internet on Valentine’s Day? Does the Internet world end on Halloween? Well, nothing as hysterical as the “Millennium Bug” but every enterprise should have an IPV4 exhaustion plan.