Bits Help - We've Run out of IP Addresses!

Just a example for Tibby, why it is a issue, when your all devices are connected directly to the internet without NAT - with extra octet, country like USA would be limited to 4294967296/311478119=13.78 devices per person. Sounds ok-ish, if you have just few computers, starts to be problematic when you start to have more (TV, radio, fridge,...). Now let's look at China - 4294967296/1339724852=3.2. Whoops, only 3 devices per person in China. Oh well, let's add China more blocks, to have it equal with USA we need to give them 4 blocks.

253 (because you can't use the 0 or 255) minus 224 (number of countries in the world) brings us to 29 reserve blocks. So, we need to give 3 extra blocks to China, 3 to India. That brings us down to 23 reserve blocks - if we take the 13 devices per country as a basis. But why not take something more close to the average as a basis, for example Russia with population of 142,905,200 - that is 30 IP per person. To get that, you need to give 9 extra blocks to China, 9 to India, 2 to USA and 1 to Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan,Nigeria and Bangladesh. Whoops, we are left with just 3 spare blocks, and we are still limited to 30 IP per person (in the larger countries; in small ones like Slovakia we would have 858 IP per person).

With IPv6, we get 4.91567039 × 10^28 IP adresses per person. Enough said .

 

I had read about this earlier this year, its good that a more robust standard is being taken up by the big players but the reality is if you a personal user there is nothing to worry about any time soon. Your ISP will have to take measure and they are either going to the new standard or finding ways to wring out more life of IPv4, such as carrier NAT that was metioned.

Also there are a stack of spare IP addresses that are simply being wasted at the moment. Again as mentioned, part of the deployment of IPv6 involves not just handing out blocks of IP addresses willy nilly, this was a mistake of early planners of IPv4. One example is entire blocks of IP addresses being arbitrarily set asside for academic institutions, the reality became there was no way they were going to use that proportion, so the majority of their addresses are unused, there is a case for them being recycled which would free up millions.

With the big players getting on board the new standard and IPv4 able to limp along much further into the future then I think we will all be fine.

 

Yes, but they are owned by someone. And transfer of ownership means trade. Yep, there is already a nice IPv4 address block trading going on, mostly Asian ISPs as buyers and American companies as sellers.

 

Obviously the addresses have monetaryvalue. If it were me, I would not invest any large amount of money into them just spend that money towards moving to the new standard, however as a stop gap establishing a market would make things easier. You would have to worry about rampant speculation driving prices up but it should be obvious that any ip address asset bubble would burst once the new standard becomes commonplace, so it should not get out of hand.

 

Microsoft bought up a big block from Nortel earlier this year as well. Big companies don't like change, unless they implement it on their time schedule.

For probably 99% of end users, the IPv6 transition will be mostly transparent. IPv6 is enabled by default in W7 (at least it is for me) on all of my NIC's. The ISP's will be the ones doing all of the work, but it makes for some welcome changes from IPv4 for network engineers.

 

Printer, Xbox, PS3, DS, any computer running XP that doesn't have IPv6 installed (it isn't by default).

Ultimately you are correct in that it is a software issue and hardware doesn't matter when it comes to IPv6 support, but what it comes down to is if the manufacturers of devices that only support IPv4 going to provide a update for them to enabled IPv6? In most cases probably not.

 

Really not much else to say here, except to agree that anyone who thinks IPv6 wont happen its loss, its a reality, and more than that, a need.

Besides the needs, come the oportunities, interwebs comunities are growing and people wanting to get out there and be heard also grows, just imagine the posibilites of every person with its own public ip address, no more web hosting, that's old, that's history, you will own you space in the INTERWEBS!! and you will be able to do whatever you want with your own space... AWESOME!!

 

How many of these are you still going to be using 10 years from now?
If the original Xbox is any example, the Xbox Live and PSN support for these consoles will end a few years after the consoles are discontinued.
How many computers running Windows 98 are you using, because 10 years from now we'll be looking at XP in the same way we look at W98 now. No one will be using XP for an online box (I have a W98 box that I like to use for the occasional old game, but I wouldn't take it online).

As to the second point, it is quite irrelevant I'm afraid. Any manufacturer not supporting IPv6 is going to find themselves sidelined, corporate suicide at its best. There is no commercial sense for ANY manufacturer to ignore IPv6, for the simple reason that there won't be any market for IPv4-only going forward.

It isn't going to be like 32bit/64bit support for example. For the average user (especially in the corporate environment) there is not compelling difference between them. 64bit offers no performance advantage and 2/3GB of RAM is more than enough, while the disadvantages are still numerous. But even then, 64bit penetration is growing steadily and all processors (certainly x86) are now x64 capable (I think the single core Atom was the last hold-out).

In contrast, the take-up of IPv6 is going to be rapid because the need is very much forced. As the article has said, there are places on the Internet where IPv6 is now a critical necessity not a geeky plaything. This necessity is going to spread rapidly. ISPs are going to be FORCED to adopt IPv6 once they find that they can no longer add new users and grow their business. The major network owners will do this first (by these I mean the telecommunications companies that own the physical media), and the smaller ones who utilise them (will be forced to follow or find themselves cut off. Once they do, they will FORCE their users to implement IPv6. Not ask, force. There will be no ability to choose to stick with IPv4. What you do on your own network is your choice, but your gateway will be IPv6 or you won't have ISP access.

 

Actually, he talks about XBOX360 and PS3. But bringing IPv6 to these consoles is rather a issue of workforce (they don't really care about it now).

 

Support for older devices will likely never be implemented as there's no profit in that; it's in manufacturer's best interest to release their next products with IPv6 instead of rettrofitting, forcing you to upgrade when it becomes a necessity. There's no reason for them to increase the longevity and support of a product when it's a clear opportunity for new sales.

 

Some one some where will still be using IPX, NetBEUI and other 'dead' protocols. They won't ever die fortunately, particularly with IPv, it's really not an issue. Getting non-TCP/IP based networks on to the internet isn't exactly straight forward. As mentioned previously IPv6 is backwards compatible with IPv4, as such it's just a case of not expanding the use of IPv4 any further and just adopt IPv6. Every thing will keep working, no one will care.

 

Adnoctum was still on the money. Brining IPv6 support to the 360 and PS3 is pointless if Xbox Live and PSN no longer support them as those features are required for online play. No way to play online, no IP issue.

 

I was referring to the Xbox 360, and using the original Xbox as a supporting example. Support for the Xbox on XBL ended last year, three and a half years after the console was discontinued. I imagine something similar would occur at the end of the Xbox 360/PS3/Wii life. No device is supported in perpetuity.

If they are, they probably have more problems than dealing with IPv6.

I wasn't sure so I looked it up on Novell's site, but they suggest the same solution for IPX as for IPv4, namely IPX-address-mapping and tunnelling (IPv6 handily has a header extension already in place for IPX-tunnelling! Somebody has been thinking about it). Seeing as NetBEUI uses TCP/IP at the very least mapping or tunnelling should work.

You can stick with IPv4 if you like, but you won't be getting any new IP addresses (so no expansion of your network) and some services are now making use of IPv6 to avoid IPv4 routing issues, so you won't be able to use them either.

Seriously, unless your doomsday machine is on a dead-man switch which triggers a "critical event" if it is taken off your antiquated, legacy network, you should be investing in new network infrastructure by now.

 

thing is PS3 DS xbox are all normal NATed devices (behind an router) so ipv6 is not really applicable for them unless your only getting IPV6 connection (not in the UK yet most will be IPV4/6 when it comes untill they really do run out of ipv4 adresses)

 

Leexgx how many customers (and other things like software packages) can have issues because of NAT? I think IPv6 will be a big plus for consumers and consumer products and their ease of use..

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ipv6 keeps a list of some ISP's with Native IPv6 already.

 

True, but very few home devices connect to the internet directly. They connect through a router. The IPv6 can go as far as the router - past then it can go through IPv4 if devices are not ready, because what tends to happen is network address translation.

 

I have my CCNA + 5 years in the telecom industry (a far cry from a network expert, but not a n00b by any standard) and tbh IPv6 baffles me. I understand that the design of IPv6 was chosen for a lot of good reasons, but all of those reasons should have been second to backwards compatibility and simplicty.

I'm predicting that if push comes to shove, many ISPs will simply start selling low end residential services as NAT only (grandma dosn't need a pubic IP...), rather than moving to IPv6.

 

a lot of it makes sense to me, but the decision to use hex and colons has screwed up my ability to quickly enter IP's.....

 

Is ::1 easier to type than 127.0.0.1? Similarly, it's entirely possible to have a network address like ::F. It can be better for the purposes of typing addresses, on the internet this will probably never be the case.

 

I just find the new address formats confusing.