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Europe needs to move to IPv6
THE INTERNET IS DOOMED until European businesses and organisations begin to move towards IPv6, according to Neelie Kroes, VP of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda.
Kroes was speaking at the German IPv6 summit, and naturally IPv6 and moves towards it were the theme of her speech.
"We are starting to see very close ahead of us the consequences if we don't make the switch to IPv6," she warned, presumably to a very receptive audience.
Kroes said that the internet is growing in use, which we have heard before, and warned that we will soon run out of space, and again this is something that we have heard before.
"More people online; more ways of getting online; more applications and devices online. All these developments put greater demands on our networks, and require ever higher performance from them," she said.
"The Internet cannot adjust to these developments, cannot continue to grow and function properly, without sufficient IP addresses."
Pretty scary stuff if you were there, by the sounds of it, and attendees were plunged into a nightmarish vision of a cramped internet.
"Imagine for a moment that no more IP addresses were available; imagine how that would cramp the development of this global resource," she said. "Well, if we don't make the change to IPv6, you may not have to imagine for very long: in Europe, total depletion of IPv4 addresses is just around the corner. The solution is to have a larger address space, now. And that means IPv6!"
Moving on to IPv6 is important for the EC and is a priority of its Digital Agenda plans for increasing local internet adoption and use. Although the EC has backed the protocol since 2002, and supports it, uptake elsewhere remains, "slow, too slow," she added.
"IPv6 remains an important building block, for two reasons," said Kroes. "The IPv4 address space is exhausted and this is impeding the growth and future development of the Internet. Many innovations fail to reach their potential due to the complexity of managing shortages. This is a deadlock situation."
Moving on to IPv6 will extend address space from the "mere" 4 billion addresses we have now to over 300 trillion trillion trillion, she added, meaning that individuals could have as many personal IP addresses as they want, or as many as there are grains of sand in the world.
"We need to act now. The longer we wait, the more it will cost us. We need to convince those most concerned to think differently, and act for the future... We must make this transition," she added.
"The alternative is that the Internet will begin to suffer; and innovation and economic growth will feel the consequences. These are not things we can afford at the moment," she concluded. µ
Tags: Internet
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"Every user will get a 48 bit address(/48), but actually more likely a /56" - when i said 48-bit addresses i meant the best-case scenario from a number of addresses pov (which is also the worst-case scenario from a functionality pov) where the end-user gets a /64, but with the first 16 bits kinda carved in stone (the 16-bit address prefix will be, at least for the foreseeable future, reserved to differentiate the address type, e.g. tunneling etc). This is why i said 48 bits.
As for a /64 address (which is actually /48 if you take out the first 16 bits) i'm very much afraid this will become the IPv6 address format of choice, and then... welcome back to the world of [PIv6] NATs nightmare (and say goodbye to any hope one might have had that the internet will be P2P again as it was first meant to be). And goodbye P2P means goodbye internet (as you'll always need a handshaking server to connect to someone, no two people on earth will be able to talk to each other without a man in the middle - which is pretty much the case today btw)
25% of top level .net, .org, and .com sites are now IPv6 reachable.
How is YOUR site doing?
Tell your ISP to pull the switch!
Every user will get a 48 bit address(/48), but actually more likely a /56 . A /64 bit address only works with IPv6 autoconfiguration if you have only one subnet at (meaning no private, public, kids, insecure and/or secure subnets).
I hear this bull over and over again: trillions of trillions etc of addresses. IPv6 in fact extends the *per-user* (i.e. per-gateway) address space from 32 bits to 48 bits (and makes *some provisions* for extending it to almost 64 bits, but actually using the full 64-bit address space would involve some nasty tricks). 48 bits is definitely way better than 32, but that's about it.
How many years (a decade?) has this babble been repeated? All this doom and gloom and yet, if it were a real issue, most of us would be on IPv6 already.
There is not much in todays tech that lasts for long. I am amazed that the fathers of the Internet had the foresight to even have 4 sets of numbers for addresses, no one even knew if it would be a success. It has lasted this long and that means they did it right from the start.