Paul Mather

Paul Mather

Every time you connect to the Internet you need an IP address. Like a recipient & sender address on an envelope, it tells the network how to send information between communicating parties, e.g. your PC and Website. Addresses are valid worldwide, and everyone needs one to communicate. However, there is a growing concern that the available addresses are running out fast, particularly with the increased number of devices that are now connecting to the Internet such as Laptops, Mobile Phone, PDAs, etc.

Although the exponential growth of the Internet is a relatively recent phenomenon, the IPV4 Internet Protocol around which it is based and which your computer, PDA or phone most likely using currently is quite old, having been standardized in 1981. The world has moved on since then with new gadgets, more memory, faster connections etc but we have continued to use this same system for well over 20 years. Many are now suggesting that it is now time for a new version called IPv6.

So are we running out of addresses? If we cast our minds back to how the Internet started then we can see that the architects had a great deal of vision to provide us with a system that has continued to work reasonably well for decades.

Internet Gurus have made predictions that we would run out of IP addresses at various points in time throughout the last two decades such as 1999, and when this didn’t happen some now say 2010 whilst others guess at 2020. Short term solutions such as DHCP allow us to reuse IP addresses (see side bar for a brief description of this). This has basically provided us with a reprieve to the move to IPv6 and is the main reason why the Gurus’ predictions have not been realised to date.

The depletion of IP addresses is not the only problem with the current Internet. The Internet was originally intended to be used for communication between very expensive mainframe computers housed in universities that were doing research for the US Department of Defence. It grew quite slowly at first to include tens of computers and these were generally connected together via 56kbps analogue leased lines which were both slow and unreliable. The routers or gateways that acted as interconnection devices between these computers had what was then a staggering 12Kbyte of memory. To put this into perspective a modern laptop has 1,000,000Kbyte (1Gbyte) of memory to support a single user and the Internet core routers have around 100Gbytes of memory. Of course, now the Internet has extended to include desktops, laptops, PDAs and mobile phones.

A few issues facing today’s Internet which have an impact on the consumer are listed below.
•Not enough IP addresses – This is seen as the biggest problem with the current IP version. The address consists of 32 bits giving a whopping 4 billion addresses but the addresses haven’t been distributed particularly well. Plus there are more than 6 billion people on the planet. So there just isn’t enough, especially when everything from the fridge to the car is expected to have a unique address. In comes IPv6 to the rescue. The developers decided to be sure we don’t have such a problem again and decided to use 128 bits for addressing. Bearing in mind that the number of addresses doubles for every bit i.e. 33 bit addressing has 8 billion addresses and 34 bit has 16 billion, it can be easily seen that 128 bit is a humungous number. It has been estimated that every grain of sand in the world could have 10 unique IP addresses.

• Quality – Although originally designed with some limited provision for quality it has not been implemented widely and web traffic, email, voice and video are given the same quality across the Internet even though their requirements are different.

• Security – Although there is the ability to provide security, security is not inherently built into IPv4. With IPv6, security support is mandatory so you can be sure that you can secure your communication if it is required. 

• Mobility – When the Internet was first designed, mobility wasn’t really a consideration since the ‘devices’ being connected often took up entire rooms. Therefore the system is designed around a device being permanently wired in at a specific location. These days with the massive growth of the cellular industry, users expect to be able to get connected while moving around globally. This is quite tricky to do with IPv4 but IPv6 has included this as part of its design where we can have seamless mobility and our IP address will move with us with our connection being maintained throughout.

When we take the above points into consideration it becomes apparent that a more modern version of IP which fixes the limitations of the ‘old’ Internet would be extremely useful. This new version was first proposed in 1993 after much input from interested parties such as governments, industry & the research community, and became an agreed standard in 1995. From the date we can see that the new version isn’t so new after all, these problems were seen a long time ago by the Internet gurus.

But if IPv6 is so good, why isn’t it prevalent by now?

Many organizations are reasonably happy with IPv4 and have “if it isn’t broken then don’t fix it” or “we can fix it without the complete overhaul to IPv6” attitudes. Others don’t know how to go about it and many are rightly concerned with things such as backwards compatibility and the cost of implementation. They most certainly have a point and there are IPv4 solutions for each of the issues we have outlined above. However IPv6 has actually been deployed in a number of networks. One of the first was the 6Bone which started operation in 1996 as an experimental network to test the interconnectivity of various IPv6 implementations, to check if IPv6 really does work well and to test the migration of the Internet to IPv6. It was however phased out on 6th June 2006 after completing its role.

Switching everybody to the new version is not an easy job. While there is automatic configuration of IPv6 on many computers it isn’t usually activated. On the network side it isn’t a case of everybody switching their computers off at night and some engineers reconfiguring all the routers and servers on the Internet while you sleep. And hey presto! You wake up in the morning and everything is sorted out.

There are many millions of devices on the Internet and a systematic planned approach is needed. But who is going to do this? Who is in-charge? Since the Internet is made up of many different networks connected together by service providers, there are different organizations in charge of different parts of it and it would seem that coordination is almost impossible.

The Internet will therefore change over an extended period of time, with some parts of it moving to IPv6 rather quickly whilst other parts may continue with IPv4 for many years. During this long transitional phase it is anticipated that the vast majority of clients as well as servers will continue to support IPv4 alongside the IPv6 and so the user will not have any difficulty in connecting to their services.

So what is the impact on the humble subscriber or Internet user? In truth, initially very little. The migration when it happens should be transparent since we’re separated from the numeric IP address by DNS. All the applications we are familiar with such as email, web browsing, etc. will continue to work in the same way. It should partially pave the way for our access provider (mobile operator, ISP, coffee outlet, etc.) to offer us a diversified and hopefully cheaper service portfolio, which will be available regardless of where we are or which device we are using to access the network.

Network operators such as cellular ISPs (see the link with mobile technology?) will be able to implement ‘walled gardens’ - a mini-Internet environment where they can control the service quality and provide more extensive services. With walled gardens, churn should be reduced. However users may be charged for this enhanced experience. There are already many devices that support IPv6 including a number of mobile phones.

The Malaysian government is committed to move to IPv6 and has outlined in both the 9th Malaysia Plan and MyICMS 886 that all devices & networks in Malaysia should be IPv6 compliant by 2010. As part of this strategy, a Malaysian National IPv6 Centre has been founded, advocating the advancement of IPv6 in Malaysia. More information can be found at http://www.nav6.usm.my/.