IDG Contributor Network: What you need to know about IPv6 in 2016
The end of one calendar year always inspires prognostication about the next. I’m not going to go so far as to make any specific predictions about networking for 2016, but there is one networking topic that should at least be on your radar for 2016: IPv6. I’m also not going to proclaim 2016 as “The Year of IPv6” or anything like that (arguably, that has already happened), but I will say that this should be the year that you start to take IPv6 seriously if you haven’t already.
As of today, four of the five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) are simply out of IPv4 space, and only AFRNIC, the African RIR, has any IPv4 left to assign. The big milestone this year was when ARIN, the RIR for North America and part of the Caribbean, issued the last IPv4 address space in its free pool. There’s been a robust secondary market for IPv4 for years, where one can buy “used” address space from third parties as opposed to obtaining “new” address space assigned by an RIR. Prices for IPv4 are rising as the impact of RIR exhaustion and resulting scarcity sets in. We’re nearing the point where the cost of obtaining sufficient IPv4 space outweighs the accommodations necessary to just use IPv6. Some organizations reached that point a long time ago: carriers realized that large mobile deployments required IPv6 to have any hope of sufficient address space.
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