Migrating Routed Networks and Services to IPv6

Overview

Residential broadband and business VPN services.

In the late Eighties, it was predicted that the internet would run out of unallocated IPv4 address space somewhere around 1994. This gave rise to much concern because such an occurrence would effectively limit further growth of the internet as no addresses would be available to connect additional devices to it. Thus, the Internet Engineering Taskforce (IETF) developed a two-pronged strategy to deal with the issue:

1. Immediately adopt a series of short-term measures, most notably classless interdomain routing (CIDR), to more efficiently and flexibly use the available IPv4 addressing space.

2. Initiate a design effort for a next-generation Internet Protocol (IPng) as the long-term solution. This development effort later became known as IPv6 and is described in Request for Comments (RFC) 1752.

The short-term measures proved to be very effective in deferring public IPv4 address exhaustion, but the adoption of IPv6 has been slow: The current allocated IPv6 address space represents less than 1pc of the IPv4 address space in use. Today, more than 10 years later, we again find ourselves in a situation where IPv4 address exhaustion is imminent, but this time there are no easy fixes in sight.

This is no cause for panic; it is simply a fact that network equipment vendors and operators must plan and prepare for, as solving the Internet Protocol (IP) address exhaustion problem is not trivial and operators who find themselves unable to obtain more IPv4 addresses will experience a significant impact on their business.