The saga of the IPv6 transition continues to surprise us all. RFC 2460, the first complete effort at a specification of the IPv6 protocol, was published in December 1998, more than twenty years ago. The entire point of IPv6 was to specify a successor protocol to IPv4 due to the prospect of running out of IPv4 addresses. Yet we ran out of IPv4 addresses more than a decade ago. more
Recent Department of Defense IPv4 activity and announcements about IPv6 indicate a shift in their perspective and suggest potential impacts on the IPv4 address market. The shift could include the release of up to 175 million IPv4 addresses in the coming years, creating a risk of a glut in the market. For perspective, the market has transferred 380 million addresses over eleven years. more
I bet that nobody believed in 1992 that thirty years later, we'd still be discussing the state of the transition to IPv6! In 1992 we were discussing what to do about the forthcoming address crunch in IPv4, and having come to terms with the inevitable prospect that the silicon industry was going to outpace the capacity of the IPv4 address pool in a couple of years, we needed to do something quickly more
Something odd happened through 2021 in the market for IPv4 addresses. Across 2021 the reported market price for the transfer of IPv4 addresses has doubled, from approximately USD $27 per IPv4 individual address at the end of 2020 to around USD $55 per address in December 2021. It has taken seven years for the market price to rise from just under USD $10 to get to USD $20 per address. The next year, 2020, saw the price rise a further USD $7 per address, and then in the next 12 months, the market price doubled. more
The network operations community is cautiously heading back into a mode of in-person meetings, and the NANOG meeting at the start of November was a hybrid affair with a mix of in-person and virtual participation, both by the presenters and the attendees. I was one of the virtual mob, and these are my notes from the presentations I found to be of personal interest. I hope you might also find them to be of interest as well... The year 2021 has not been a good year for Internet outages. more
For the past few decades, there's been a relatively straightforward narrative on the economics behind the IPv6 transition that goes something like this: sooner or later, IPv4 scarcity will drive costs up until they exceed those of deploying IPv6. A competitive market will then make the rational choice and transition to a more efficient mode of production and deploy IPv6. This is textbook economics, and - with the disclaimer that I'm not a trained economist - it appears to be incorrect. more
It's now been a decade since the world officially ran out of blocks of IP addresses. In early 2011 the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) announced that it had allocated the last block of IPv4 addresses and warned ISPs to start using the new IPv6 addresses. But here we are a decade later and not one of my clients has converted to IPv6. more
Time for another annual roundup from the world of IP addresses. Let's see what has changed in the past 12 months in addressing the Internet and look at how IP address allocation information can inform us of the changing nature of the network itself. Back around 1992, the IETF gazed into their crystal ball and tried to understand how the Internet was going to evolve and what demands would be placed on the addressing system as part of the "IP Next Generation" study. more
Dear Chief Financial Officers of tech giants, the internet is in crisis, and you can lead your organization to help solve the problem. You'll be well compensated, and you'll enjoy massive public relations benefits. I fear that if you don't, global governments will force your hand. There is a shortage of available IPv4 addresses but we are years away (possibly a decade or more) from IPv6 viability and adoption in North America. more
I spend most of my time teaching engineers in different countries how to plan and deploy IPv6 networks. Over the last two years, I have been speaking more and more to non-engineers. These are either technology executives who sense that they need to do something about this "IPv6" thing, or government IT leaders who want to understand what the problem is and more importantly, what they could do. The most impactful part of these these exchanges is when I get these managers to understand the implications of IPv4 address exhaustion to their organisations. more
Alain Durand, Principal Technologist at ICANN, visited Georgia Institute of Technology last week for a talk on the global adoption of Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). The Internet Governance Project organized the talk in cooperation with Atlanta's Technology Development Center (ATDC) and the Institute for Information Security and Privacy. Durand, who was involved in the IPv6 standardization efforts at IETF back in the early to mid-1990s, offered a clear eyed assessment of the protocol's critical flaw... more
After some years of accelerating IPv6 deployment, we are now into a period of slower growth and it's not clear where we are heading. It is therefore interesting to try to predict the future of IPv6 over the coming years. At Ericsson Research, we have been working on this topic since 2013, but just recently created a forecast model that seems to be quite accurate. However, it gives a disappointing message of a very low final level of IPv6 deployment at less than 30%! more
This year marked the 10th anniversary of collecting statistics for IPv6 from the Christmas Goat. It's the third year now with almost no snow, and with this crazy winters and climate, it's hard to get any good photos of the goat. The photo is only from 3–4 days in early December with little snow so far in Gävle.The measurements this year started very low with 20% IPv6, but it made some improvements and landed just like 2018 at a total of 41%. more
Time for another annual roundup from the world of IP addresses. Let's see what has changed in the past 12 months in addressing the Internet and look at how IP address allocation information can inform us of the changing nature of the network itself. Back in around 1992 the IETF gazed into the crystal ball and tried to understand how the internet was going to evolve and what demands that would place on the addressing system as part of the "IP Next Generation" study. more
The number of IPv4 transactions and volume of IP addresses flowing to and from organizations in the ARIN region in the last 6 months put 2018 on track to be the most active year in the history of the IPv4 market. Nearly 25 million numbers were transferred in the first half of this year, more than doubling the volume of numbers transferred by this time last year and continuing the level of market activity in the last half of 2017 when just over 28 million numbers were transferred. more
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