According to ARIN’s estimate, on Septermber 11, 2011, all available ipv4 address will be exhausted. Now, that does not mean that the Internet will stop working. However, it will mean that new services that rely on a pool of addresses will have a hard time securing addresses. Will this force us to start using IPV6? I don’t think so. I think we are uttully unprepared for the IPV6 roll out. The mistake of IPV6 designers that it is not backward compatible, is hitting home hard and fast. Will we design IPV7 with backward compatible stacks? I don’t think we have enough time. Besides, what about the investments we made on IPV6? So, we have a situation. There is no easy way out.
We can buy some time with re-aquiring ‘seldom’ used addresses. For example, there are large blocks of addresses not being advertised on the Internet. We can start forcing them to use private address range if they do not advertise on the Internet. From a corporate point of view, there are many reasons why they would not want to have their internal ip address known on the Internet. But, if it is not needed, let’s have them use a separate range, maybe a newly created class B for this purpose. I can see a non-private range but still not routable on the Internet, created for these companies. Let’s face it, we are all proxying and NATting addresses anyway.
Sep 11, 2011 – The day ipv4 address ran out.
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