Running out of addresses?

For the past 10 years, I have read countless articles citing the Internet's limited address resources. For more than a decade, professors, technologists, administrators, and columnists have noted that one day, probably soon, we will run out of IP addresses to assign for the whole world! And of course, this would lead to catastrophe the likes of which mankind has never seen.

The reality behind the move to IPv6 (the next version of the Internet Protocol) is actually about more than just addresses, though. Yes, we will have enough unique and usable addresses to pretty much connect all of the molecules in the universe to the internet. But, what about network management? Why isn't anyone discussing this facet?

Today, if you are an Internet Service Provider, you hand out an address to every customer. Customarily, businesses start with five addresses, and can request more if they need them. The way the internet was originally envisioned, though, was that every device on every network would have it's own REAL address. So, by that standard we have run out several times over. This is where NAT came in. Multiple computers could be used on a private network, and each of those computers would hide behind a single public address. Clever, simple, and problematic for software.

Now consider this- A customer has requested an additional block of five addresses, but the next five (sequentially) are already used by someone else! What do you do? You could ask someone to change their IP addresses, but most people avoid this at all costs. You could do some fancy routing to get a new address block to show up for the customer, but that's an even bigger pain! Why not assign such a high number of addresses that the customer will never run out? Ever. This is where IPv6 makes its biggest impact.

With IPv6, I could assign a customer many thousand or even hundreds of thousands of addresses. Because the global pool is so massive, those wouldn't even account for 1% of the available space! This means, no more changes, no more requesting address space from providers, no more funky routing schemes, and most of all, no more NAT! These are all GREAT things!! And best of all, they are easily attained.

For the one-time cost of updating your internet equipment, you could be granted an IPv6 block of addresses. Every computer on your network would have its own, globally reachable (if you want) address, which would make things like file sharing an IM work more reliably. The benefits are so numerous, they would literally be impossible to list here.

Many nay-sayers, however, will tell you that switching to IPv4 is costly, time consuming, and requires a new set of skills. I would like to ask who is running such outdated hardware that it couldn't access IPv6? Most of the internet is very new, and even the old parts could EASILY be updated or encapsulated in IPv6. Moreover, the world economy could certainly stand a project that would stimulate job growth.

The bottom line is this. I'm tired of hearing people talk about the impending doomsday, when we run out of internet addresses. Will it happen? Yes, of course. It technically already has. But until people stop dragging their heels on the upgrades, there isn't a thing we can do about it. Just sit back, relax, and wait for the disaster.