Enjoy it while it lasts folks, ’cause the ole Interwebs is gonna implode in just over 700 days. I’m talking about the IP address crunch. Kind of like peak oil, we’re burning though the last 10% of the available Internet addresses at a rate that puts us firmly on track to run out in mid-to-late 2011. If you take perverse pleasure from such a thing, you can watch the addresses running out before your very eyes, rather like sand though an hourglass. If that doesn’t turn your crank, Wikipedia offers a helpful executive summary of our digital plight.
“Oh NOs!”, say all the bloggers and gamers and porn site magnates. “The sky is falling! What will we do?”
Well, tadpoles, IP version 6 is supposed to be the answer — a new addressing scheme to replace the aged and venerable IP version 4. (Don’t ask what happened to version 5. I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.) IPv6 encompasses an address space that is so super-large that we could give out a gazillion addresses a day every day until the sun becomes a cold dark cinder and not come anywhere near running out.
“Well great!” say all the facebookers and twitter addicts. “Lets move over to that.”
Only one problem, I say (as does Dan Bernstien). When the bright boys and girls at the IETF sat down and designed IPv6, they designed it to be a replacement for IPv4 rather than an extension to it. In a nutshell, this means that there is no easy way to get IPv6 to talk to IPv4.
So, imagine it. The day finally comes in 2011 when they run out of version 4 IP’s. The next poor sod to request an address from the IANA will get, by default, a version 6 IP, and then he will discover that he can only talk to the rest of the Internet if he uses special, clunky and slow, translation services for his connection. Think Network Address Translation times ten, with horns and a pitchfork. His connectivity will suck, and it will only get worse as more and more sites are forced to adopt IPv6 and use these same translation services to reach the majority of IPv4-only sites on the Internet. Then, on top of that, imagine all the disruption that will be caused by other sites upgrading voluntarily to IPv6 and encountering all the bugs in various vendor’s implementation of the IPv6 network stack that will only come to light under sustained real-world use. Finally, imagine all the screw-ups that will happen as the Sympaticos and Verizons of the world start deploying a network stack that most of their staff have no experience with.
Changing the Internet from IPv4 to IPv6 will be rather like trying to change the tablecloth on a table that seats 500 million diners who are all eating boiling hot soup. Even if nobody gets permanently burned or maimed, it’s still gonna be a f**king mess.
But I’ll probably make a killing as an IPv6 transition consultant.