IPv6 exec says sound the alarm

Credit: NetworkWorld.com

The sky is falling on the number of global IP addresses, and IPv6 is the solution, executives from major technology companies said Wednesday.

The exhaustion of available IP addresses using IPv4 brought out the alarmist side of many industry executives. "It's a crisis -- not a market-oriented event," said Akinori Maemora, chairman of APNIC (Asia Pacific Network Information Centre), speaking at the Global IPv6 Summit in Beijing. "We have just three years until IPv4 addresses are depleted. These changes will come suddenly," he said.

The telecom industry is going through "a period of grief" over the end of IPv4, said Tony Hain, IPv6 technical leader for Cisco. "Most people in the world are still in a state of denial" about upgrading to IPv6. "No one will ask for IPv6 until they run out of IPv4 addresses," he said.

IP addresses allow individual devices, including computers, laptops and mobile handsets to connect to the Internet. Using the current IPv4 system, which offers a total of about 4.7 billion possible IP addresses, some countries, including China, will begin to run out of addresses they can allocate around 2010, according to estimates by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

By switching to IPv6, the number of possible addresses increases by billions more. This would also allow a far greater number of devices to connect, allowing features such as the Internet-based remote control of security cameras, and even turning on home appliances from one's desktop at work.

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