We’ve been discussing the dramatic growth of the global Internet and the expansion of physical devices and virtual spaces that come with the mobile revolution, social networking, cloud computing, and the larger move of the Net into every business practice and cultural nook.
Last week ICANN, the organization that administers the Internet’s domain space, announced that fewer than 10% of current-generation Internet addresses (IPv4) remain unallocated. In any network realm, a move above 90% capacity is an alarm bell that needs attention. IPv6 is the next generation address space and is being deployed. But the move needs to accelerate to ensure the unabated growth of the Net.
Developed in the 1990s, IPv6 has been available for allocation to ISPs since 1999. An increasing number of ISPs have been deploying IPv6 over the past decade, as have governments and businesses. The biggest attraction of IPv6 is the enormous address space it provides. Instead of just 4 billion IPv4 addresses – fewer than the number of people on the planet – there are 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 IPv6 addresses. An easier way to think of this number is 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses.
Or, the famous comparison: If IPv4 is a golf ball, IPv6 is the Sun.
