Is IPv6 inevitable?
The world will run out of IP addresses before it runs out of oil. There’s an answer for both problems, but for political and economic reasons, neither answer has been implemented. So will we switch to IPv6 before we stop putting petrol in our cars?
When counting how many IP addresses we might one day use, you start to count the number of computers in your home. But you should not be thinking only of computers, and you should not only think of your house. Think of the other things around you in the world. Most people have a place of work – with potentially nearly as many addresses per person. Most people require a large number of services – someday every streetlight, sewer pipe and bus stop may need an address.
The trend is already towards more computers per person, as they become more accepted and affordable. Soon everyone will want their own desktop, laptop, PDA, phone, file server, home entertainment system, games console, active picture frames, and more. Our kids will grow up knowing more and wanting more. By the time I have kids, they will probably want a router and firewall between their room and the rest of the house in the same way i wanted a bolt on my bedroom door as a child.
Many complex devices may be made up of multiple smaller individually addressable items. The personal transport of the future that replaces cars as we know them may have control units, black box units, reporting units, negotiation units, entertainment units and communication units, all using public addresses.
We may very well end up with disposable, mass produced items (even groceries) with allocated IP addresses.
I can imagine tens or hundreds of thousands of addresses per person. For every one of the increasing billions of people in the world.
With the current system of course, none of this is possible. IP address are going to increase in value and NAT or other gateway systems will increase in complexity. Only a few people will own more than 1 IP address, and the rest will huddle huge clusters of devices behind routers, fiddling with complex settings and accepting limited functionality. Makes you wonder whether to hope for the best or starting investing in addresses…
This is what prompted my musings:
Computerworld | Experts at odds over relevance of IPv6
Posted by akaDruid on 11 Nov 2005 at 01:11 pm
Posted in , (Visited 806 times)
2 Comments »
Here’s a firmware mod that actually does something witih IPv6. Users get a /64 routed to their home in a manner similar to how DHCP allocates and routes a single /32 now. Hosts in the home acquire one of these /64 addresses via stateless autoconfiguration.
Very slowly, we see users finding ways to use IPv6, and in this case, obsoleting NAT. Many of tus believe NAT is keeping food off the table, as it represents a tax on application developers and service providers alike, many of whom are simply not willing to pay.
Skeptics point to a lack of IPv6-aware (whatever that means) as a reason IPv6 is wedged. This is nonsense: we have an app that will leverage IPv6: VoIP. Talk to the larger VoIP service providers and you’ll learn that because of the problems NAT causes with bearing UDP based voice, these providers find it *easier* to handle all the voice media for all calls rather than let the voice media go p2p, as SIP cleanly allows once the call setup signalling is complete. That’s a real shame, because it doesn’t have to be this way. So SIP-based voice is your killer IPv6 app.
Disclaimer: I work at EathLink, but the firmware below is free, and we’ll show you how to configure your network so you can reproduce what we did. The work is not a solution to all our problems, but it helps keep the conversation going.
http://www.research.earthlink.net/ipv6/
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Thanks for your comment. I don’t have a Linksys WRT54G (or Earthlink) so I can’t evaluate this firmware, but it’s nice to know that at least one ISP is seriously working towards IPv6.
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