IPv4, IPv6, and World IPv6 Day: The Asteroid Is Coming, But We’ll Blow It Up Together

If you read a lot of technology blogs — or really, even one on occasion — you have likely heard of something called IPv4 address exhaustion, and a lot of talk about moving towards an address protocol called IPv6.

It gets complicated fast. This post is meant to cover the issue at a cocktail-party level, and explain Time Warner Cable’s role in the future of IPv6.

The IP in IPv4 and IPv6 stands for Internet Protocol. It is, essentially, the system by which machines can send data from one specific machine to another across a network of other machines. Every Internet-enabled device has a unique address known as an IP address. You may have seen these and not known it – they are sort of like the bar codes of the digital world. They look like this: 192.168.5.255.

Each IP address is a unique digital snowflake – no two are exactly the same. Back in the ’70s, when the Internet was just invented, there were roughly 4.3 billion available addresses in IPv4. Now we are running out.

Vint Cerf, the Internet’s godfather, blames himself. From Engadget:

Back in 1977, Cerf led a team of DARPA researchers in creating IPv4, which limits IP addresses to four 8-bit numbers or 32-bits total, providing for 4.3 billion addresses: not nearly enough by today’s standards … Cerf said he never expected his protocol to take off, adding, “Who the hell knew how much address space we needed?”

IPv6 is a new Internet protocol that has 2128 (approximately 340 undecillion or 3.4×1038) available addresses. It may be a little while yet before we run out of those. IANA is the governing body on the Internet that hands out IPv4 addresses for eventual use by ISPs like Time Warner Cable. On February 3rd, they gave out their last blocks of open addresses.

The Internet as we know it isn’t going to just grind to a halt overnight. But without a concerted effort from every ISP, website, device manufacturer and more, things could get really slow and unpleasant. Right now, most IPv4 enabled devices don’t work with IPv6. Things could start get slower, buggier — more crash-y.

It’s going to be okay, though. For real. To my way of thinking, this situation is not unlike the Y2K crisis we all heard so much about in the late ’90s. It was a big deal, and an imminent, foreseeable problem. But engineers, ISPs, and all the other laborers of the exploding technium as we knew it back then agreed that the coming crisis was worth uniting to work against. There was no partisan bickering or petty corporate land-grabbing. Everyone put in a lot of long hours and hard work behind the scenes, and the rest of us woke up to a normal New Year’s day with nothing to worry about apart from our usual hangovers.

I expect the transition to IPv6 will be somewhat similar. Here’s a statement about Time Warner Cable’s role in the coming transition from our CTO Mike LaJoie:

“Time Warner Cable has long been preparing for the eventual end of IPv4 address availability. We’ve decided that the best architecture for ensuring the level of performance our customers expect is “dual stack,” which supports both IPv4 and IPv6 protocols. We, along with other MSOs, have been working with CableLabs, NCTA and the SCTE in a multi-industry effort to adopt the IPv6 protocol, and are hopeful that companies in the CE and vendor communities begin to offer new equipment and provide firmware upgrades that ensure the devices in our customers’ homes support IPv6. Time Warner Cable signed up its first commercial customer using native IPv6 over our fiber access product last year, and we expect to begin residential IPv6 trials this spring.”

We’ll be taking part in World IPv6 day, too — a day of testing to see how IPv6 works on a massive, public scale. Here’s the gist, from Wikipedia:

The World IPv6 Day is an event organized by the Internet Society and several large content providers to test public IPv6 deployment.[1] It will start 00:00 UTC on June 8, 2011 and end 23:59 the same day.[2] The main motivation for the event is to evaluate the real world effects of the IPv6 brokenness seen by various synthetic tests. The event is also known as Test Drive Day.

The test will primarily consist of websites publishing AAAA records, allowing IPv6 capable hosts to connect using IPv6. Although Internet service providers (ISP) are encouraged to participate, they are not expected to deploy anything on that day, just increase their readiness to handle support issues.

Metaphorically speaking, yes, there is a giant asteroid hurtling towards the Internet with the potential to destroy it. But all of us in the industry – from Google to ARIN to Time Warner Cable, Akamai and more are forming up like the Justice League, strapping on our super-capes and getting ready to vaporize that thing in the name of truth, justice, and cute little kitten photos.

Don’t worry, everything will be fine.

Categories: What's New