Arrival of IPv6

As the Internet has grown, IPv4 addresses have been depleting at an increasing rate. On February 3, 2011, the last five Class A blocks of undistributed IPv4 addresses were allocated by IANA to the five RIRs, indicating that the global pool has officially been depleted. On April 15, 2011, APNIC exhausted its remaining pool of IPv4 addresses, except for a small reserve kept with the transition to IPv6 in mind. Shortly thereafter, ARIN issued a policy proposal explaining its process for the distribution of its remaining IPv4 addresses based on company size to ensure equitable treatment of its members.

IPv6 was developed by an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working group. The IETF’s stated mission is “to make the Internet work better”. The IETF itself is an organized activity of the Internet Society (ISOC), a non-profit organization founded in 1992 to provide leadership in Internet-related standards, education and policy. When ARIN first introduced Internet users to the concept of IPv6 address space, it described it as “a public resource that must be managed in a prudent manner with regards to the long-term interests of the Internet.” IPv6 can support an unprecedented number of IP addresses. Now that IPv4 addresses are more difficult, and soon to be impossible, to obtain via normal means through an RIR, companies have begun to seriously consider the transition to and use of IPv6. Some, mostly non-profits and government organizations, have already begun moving in that direction and preparing to make the switch. Others have been seeking to utilize the number of unassigned IPv4 addresses that remain.

In terms of overall marketplace response to the depletion of new IPv4 addresses, recent research found that only 0.25 percent of the world's top one million websites utilize working IPv6 versions of their websites, and IPv6 traffic volumes only account for between 0.1 and 0.2 percent of all Internet traffic. While that may be the case now, other research predicts a dramatic increase in IPv6 adoption in the next 3-5 years. IPv6 addresses are appealing because they have a much larger theoretical maximum due to the fact that they are 128-bit in length. IPv6 will provide trillions upon trillions of new addresses.