Tag Archives: IPv4

What Ever Happened to IPv6?

It’s been over ten years since the launch of IPv6, the Internet address system that was supposed to give us nearly infinite number of IP addresses. But after a decade of implementation, just over 21% of all websites worldwide will support IPv6 addresses.

On the surface, this makes no sense. The original IPv4 standard only supports about 4.3 billion IP addresses. We clearly have far more people and devices connected to the Internet than that number. By contrast, IPv6 provides 340 trillion trillion trillion IP addresses, a number that, for all practical purposes, is unlimited.

Even though we exhausted the supply of IPv4 addresses years ago, it doesn’t look like there is any rush for most of the world to move to the new IP addresses. There are obvious barriers to making the conversion that most ISPs and businesses are not ready to tackle. Most of the barriers to making the conversion can be categorized as hardware limitations, lack of training, and the overall cost of the conversion.

It’s a little hard to believe after a decade, but many older computers, servers, and routers will still not recognize IPv6 addresses. One would have to think that we’ll eventually ditch the older devices, but there are apparently still a huge number of devices that can’t process IPv6 addresses. The good news is that newer operating systems and devices will handle the new addresses. But the world still has plenty of folks using older versions of Windows, Linux, Android, and iOS. Big corporations are reluctant to make the switch to IPv6 out of fear of older technology around the company that would stop working. Smaller companies are not willing to make the change until they have no choice.

This issue is compounded by the fact that direct communication between IPv4 and IPv6 devices is impossible, and all exchange of data must pass through an IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack conversion to enable communications. This was originally envisioned as a temporary fix, but as IPv4 continues to be used, this is looking to be permanent.

Companies are also loath to tackle the cost and effort of the upgrade without some compelling reason to do so. Companies that have made the change report a number of unexpected problems with a conversion that can be disruptive, and companies are not willing to tackle something this complicated unless they have to.

It’s interesting to see how various countries have decided to make the switch to IPv6. Google has been collecting statistics on IPv6 conversions that are summarized on this map. At the time I wrote this blog, the world leaders in conversion to IPv6 are France (75%), India (68%), Germany (67%), Malaysia (62%), and Saudi Arabia (61%). Much of the rest of the world is far behind with the upgrade, including Russia (7%), China (3%), and much of Africa below 1%.

The US is just above 50% utilization of IPv6. Interestingly, the US backslid and was at a 56% IPv6 conversion rate in 2019. The resurgence of IPv4 is being credited to the huge flood of folks working at home during the pandemic – since residential ISPs have mostly not made the conversion.

Internet experts believe we’ll still be running dual IPv4 and IPv6 networks for at least a few more decades. We’ve found ways to work around the lack of IPv4 addresses, and very few companies or ISPs are seeing any urgency to rush toward a conversion. But as the worldwide penetration of broadband continues to grow and as we add more connected devices, the pressure will increase to eventually make the conversion. But don’t expect to see any headlines because it’s not happening any time soon.

 

The IP Address Crunch

4cb1f2dc96040Sometimes it feels like small ISPs just move from one crisis to another. The latest problem I am hearing about is that ISPs are having a hard time getting new IP addresses – which is something they need in order to connect new customers to their network. I have clients who have been trying for months to find new addresses, and if they don’t find any they are soon going to have to turn away new customers.

We’ve known for decades that we would exhaust the current IP addresses. The IP world introduced IPV6 IP addresses back in 2011 and that was supposed to be enough new IP addresses to last the whole world for a long time into the future. Historically the original Internet used IPV4 IP addresses, of which there was about 4.3 billion. The new addresses have more digits and there are about 79 with 28 zeroes after it times more IPV6 addresses. Even the tens of billions of expected IoT devises won’t make a dent in the new inventory of IP addresses.

So how can there be a shortfall of IP addresses with so many new ones available? The problem is the speed at which the world is implementing the new IPV6 addresses. Some of the large companies like Comcast, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile have swapped all of their customers to IPV6 addresses. But the implementation has been slow. Google probably has the best measure of IPV6 implementation since they see a large chunk of the world’s traffic. By 2014 they reported that only 2% of the IP addresses in the world had been converted to IPV6. At the end of last month that had finally climbed to 14% of all IP addresses.

But so far the conversions have been done by the largest ISPs. It is exceedingly hard for small ISPs to make this transition. They are more or less locked into the IP practices of the large carriers that sell them Internet bandwidth. It’s been estimated that the small companies might not be offered IPV6 until perhaps 50% to 60% of the Internet traffic is using the new addressing standard. By the looks of the growth curve that is still at least a few years away.

The bodies that assign IP addresses have all run out of new addresses. The Internet Assigned Number Authority (IANA) free pool of numbers ran dry in February 2011. There are five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) around the world and the last one of them ran out of IP addresses last year. Since then ISPs can’t get IP addresses through the normal channels.

So small ISPs are stuck in limbo. If they want to grow they need new IP addresses, but there are none available in the traditional channels. As happens with any scarce resource a new market of brokers has stepped in to supply the demand for IP addresses. There are several of these brokers worldwide. These brokers have gone to large companies like GE, Haliburton and Ford and bought their inventories of unused IP addresses. And this process created a market.

Back in 2012 these brokers established market prices for IP addresses. The prices started at about $5 per IP address. But as these brokers have found fewer unused blocks, and as there are more ISPs looking for numbers, the prices have risen and IP addresses today sell for between $11 and $15 per IP address.

So small ISPs should just be able to buy what they need from these brokers, right? Unfortunately it’s not that easy. The addresses are sold through a periodic online auction process, and like happens with any rare resource there are now speculators buying IP addresses with the hope of selling them later at a higher price. The competition in the auction processes has become fierce. To some extent this is like the process for trading bitcoins and those with the fastest and most powerful computers can win the auctions. The small ISPs I know tell me they are not getting any addresses. I know one ISP who has failed at the process for over 6 months.

So we now have a situation where small ISPs are nearly locked out of the process of buying new IP addresses (and even if they buy them they are expensive). This shortfall and the auction arbitrage is likely to last for a few more years. The economics of the market tell us that at some point the arbitrage price for IP addresses will drop. When that happens the speculators in the market will ditch their inventory and there should be IP addresses available at lower prices than today and more easily available. But that’s not expected until there are a lot more IPV6 users. The ISPs might be facing this problem for the next two years. I feel certain that we are going to see small ISPs that will find themselves unable to add new customers to their networks – and in world where we want broadband everywhere that is a disaster.

Finally Time to Convert to IPv6?

Rolling diceIn early 2011 the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) allocated the last block of IPv4 addresses to various countries and warned that at the rate of historic usage that all those numbers would get gobbled up by ISPs within a few months. They further foresaw all sorts of new demands for IP addresses for new industry products like wearables, BYOD devices being connected to corporate WANs, an explosion of smartphones in the developing world and the early stages of the Internet of Things.

The IANA warned then that ISPs should begin migrating to IPv6 to avoid running out of IP addresses. But here we are almost four years later and a lot of ISPs still have not converted to IPv6. And yet somehow we are not quite out of numbers. The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) for the United States and Canada is still handing out IP addresses even today. How is that possible?

The major Internet players in the markets developed ways to conserve and reclaim IP addresses. At the end of 2013 ARIN still had 24 million addresses available. ARIN has been able to stretch the numbers by doing things like reclaiming IP addresses from dead ISPs, and by doling out IP addresses in much smaller blocks than historically. ARIN was predicting that those addresses would be gone before the end of 2014. But again the industry confounded them and there were still 16 million IP addresses at the end of 2014. You can see the count of available addresses at this web site, which is updated weekly.

So is now finally the time to convert to IPv6 or can the industry stretch this further? The issue is going to be of the most concern for growing networks that need a lot of new addresses. If you are growing you might should  convert to IPv6 before you find yourself stopped dead due to lack of IP addresses. ISPs that are not growing are probably good for some time since they can usually use numbers abandoned by old customers and assign them to new ones.

Why haven’t more ISPs converted to IPv6? There are a number of reasons.

  • IPv6 is not backwards compatible and once you convert you need to run what is called a dual stack that will process both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. And you will have to do that until IPv4 addresses are finally dead.
  • The conversion to IPv6 can be expensive. Every part of your network needs to be IPv6 compatible – that means core hardware, end-user hardware, your Internet backbone provider and even content providers on the web.
  • Not all of the content on the Internet is IPv6 compatible. Almost every major site like Google, Yahoo, Facebook and anybody else with a household name is now IPv6 compatible, but there are older content providers who have not bothered, and maybe who will never bother to make the conversion. (And it’s not so much the content, but the servers they sit on).
  • There is no problem buying new hardware that is IPv6 compatible. So any new gear being installed today is already IPv6 compatible. But this is no help for older routers and gear that is not easily upgraded, and many companies are holding off to avoid the capital outlay or upgrades that will be needed to convert to IPv6. There probably is no way to upgrade a 10-year old DSL modem or a DOCSIS 1.1 modem to IPv6 without changing devices.

But we are finally seeing some large players converting. For example, Comcast converted all of their cable modem customers to IPv6 during 2014. But some other large ISPs are still holding back. Other parts of the industry have converted – most smartphones now use IPv6 as well as new game consoles.

Now that some large ISPs have converted and most of the web has converted most industry experts expect the rate of conversion to accelerate. Small ISPs need to pay attention to what is happening with IPv6 because you don’t want to be the last one to make the conversion. Once most of the rest of the world has converted you can expect to start having compatibility problems in unexpected places. And eventually the large carriers are going to declare IPv4 dead and cut it off. I’m thinking that most small ISPs ought to finally think about converting by no later than next year. If you wait longer than that it becomes a crap shoot.

Converting to IPv6

By now most of you know that there is a new version of Internet addressing that has been introduced known as IP version 6 (IPv6). The process to integrate the new protocol into the network has already begun and it’s now time for smaller ISPs like my clients to begin looking at how they are going to make the transition. I call it a transition because the planned process is for the old IPv4 and IPv6 to coexist side-by-side until the old protocol is eventually phased out of existence. Some experts predict that the last vestiges of IPv4 addressing will survive until 2030, but between now and then every part of the Internet will begin the transition and will begin using the new address scheme.

The IPv6 specification makes major changes to internet addressing. Not only has the IP address length been extended to 128 bits but also the IP header format and the way header information is processed have been modified. Thus, transitioning from IPv4 to IPv6 is not going to be straightforward and it is going to take some work to go from old to new.

I think it is time to start thinking about how you are going to make the transition to enable both kinds of routing. Any small ISP will want to do this in a controlled and leisurely manner and not wait until there is an urgent need for it on your network. There are already some new kinds of hardware and software systems that are going to prefer to use the new protocol, and so small ISPs ought to get ready to make the change before you get a frantic call from a large customer asking why this doesn’t work on your network.

The basic process to get ready to migrate to IPv6 is to make certain that your core routers and other host systems in your network are able to handle IPv6 routing. There are three different transition techniques that are being used around the country to make the transition.

Dual-stack Network. This approach allows hosts and routers to implement both IPv4 and IPv6 protocols. This will let your network support both IPv4 and IPv6 during the transition period. This is currently the most common technique being used to introduce IPv6 into legacy networks. The biggest downside of the approach is that you must create a mirror-image IPv4 address for every new IPv6 address, and the whole point of moving to IPv6 was due to the scarcity of IPv4 addresses.

Tunnelling. This technique essentially hands off all new IPv6 routing to somebody else in the cloud. To make this work your network would encapsulate IPv6 packets while they are crossing your existing IPv4 network and decapsulate the packets at the border to the external cloud. This is somewhat complex to establish but reports are that it can work well when configured correctly.

Use a Translation Mechanism. This method is necessary when an IPv6-only host has to communicate with an IPv4 host. At a minimum this requires translation of the IP header packets, but it can get a lot more complicated.

And, as one would suspect, you can mix and match these various techniques as needed. It’s obvious to me that this could become very complex and there appears to be a lot of chances to mess up your network routing if you don’t do it right. Because of this we think it makes sense to start planning early on how you are going to make the transition. You do not want to wait until one or more of your largest customers are breathing down your neck demanding a transition, so you should start early and make a plan. Contact us at CCG and we can help you make a plan for an orderly transition to IPv6.