RA Florian Hitzelberger | October 31, 2024
Imagine a scenario where the Internet is running out of IPv4 addresses, and yet, few seem to care. Researcher Geoff Huston has delved into the sluggish shift towards IPv6, questioning this transition’s effectiveness.
Since 2002, we’ve discussed the Internet of the future, underpinned by IPv6. This protocol was designed to replace IPv4, which provides the foundation of the Domain Name System (DNS). IPv4 offers around 4.2 billion addresses, but these are dwindling as internet-enabled devices proliferate. Engineers at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) introduced IPv6 in the early 1990s, theoretically offering over 3.4 × 10^38 unique addresses. Despite this vast capacity, IPv6 adoption has yet to reach a global scale.
The scarcity of IPv4 addresses has spurred a market, with prices averaging between $30 and $40 per address. Despite repeated warnings from the five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) about the looming shortage, a full shift to IPv6 remains distant. In May 2022, Geoff Huston from the Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) pointed out that while the RIRs’ warnings may have once conveyed urgency, this sense has now faded. By 2024, Huston’s outlook has become even more pessimistic: only about one-third of Internet users are exclusively using IPv6. All others remain reliant on IPv4, despite predictions that the IPv4 address pool should have already been exhausted. To keep pace with the growing number of internet-connected devices — estimated at around 20 billion by the end of 2024 — the Internet now shares each IPv4 address among an average of seven devices.
Huston remarks:
“If end-to-end was the sustaining principle of the Internet architecture, then as far as the users of IPv4-based access and services are concerned, it’s all over.”
Huston also acknowledges IPv6’s limitations: it isn’t faster, more versatile, or inherently more secure than IPv4. Nor does it offer significant advantages in terms of cost savings or market share. IPv6’s primary benefit is simply its expanded address space.
For Huston, the transition will only be complete when IPv4 is no longer necessary—when Internet Service Providers can operate a functional service using IPv6 exclusively, without supporting IPv4 access. He suggests that network operators should first invest in a dual-stack platform to begin phasing out IPv4. In a provocative tone, he asks:
“Is universal unique endpoint addressing a 1980s concept whose time has come and gone? If network transactions are localized, then what is the residual role of a unique global endpoint addressing clients or services?”
Huston even questions the very definition of the Internet as a shared transmission structure and protocol address pool, without providing a definitive answer. But one thing is clear: despite the shortage of IPv4 addresses, the growth of the Internet faces no immediate technical constraints, nor is there any limitation on the registration of new domain names.
News Source:Domain-Recht，This article does not represent our position.
