The vast majority of you out there have an IPv4 type address. This is the type we’re all familiar with, that being the four octets of xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx. Many of you also know the difference in IPv4 classes as well, such as the fact that home wireless routers assign Class C addresses.
Something that has been a legitimate problem ever since the internet as a whole gained popularity is the fact there are only so many public assignable IPs, as in IP addresses that are world accessible and not the ones assigned by your home router.
Some big corporations realized this early on and snatched up all they could. A good example of this is General Electric Company. Every single world accessible IP address that starts with a 3 belongs to them.
The solution to running out of world accessible addresses has actually been around for a while, that being IPv6. Instead of the IPv4 32-bit length, IPv6 addresses are 128 bits long and alphanumeric. An example IPv6 address would be 3ffe:1900:4545:3:200:f8ff:fe21:67cf. It’s pretty darned big, and it opens up an enormous amount of assignable addresses, killing the space problem in very short order.
In the U.S., the problem has been that our ISPs here have been very slow to adapt IPv6. Reasons cited for the slow adaptation have mainly been cost, as it’s not cheap to implement whatsoever.
However, after all this time (IPv6 was defined in 1998, if you can believe it,) U.S. ISPs are finally starting to get the hint that more address space is desperately needed. They absolutely have to get on the ball with this, because otherwise the IPv4s are expected to be exhausted by 2012. Once the IPv4 addresses are all gone, that’s it. ISPs would literally be unable to provide internet connectivity service to any new customers at all. Bear in mind this is not just for the home but also counts for wireless smartphone internet use as well.
The requests by the major ISPs for IPv6 address space have taken a big jump lately and that’s great because they’re preparing for the IPv4 address exhaustion. If all goes well there should (fingers crossed) hopefully be a seamless transition from 4 to 6.
Will you need to buy a new router to support IPv6 when it comes around?
Most likely not, as there are transition methods already available that can make IPv6 connectivity available thru IPv4, so chances are you probably won’t have to change around any of your network hardware.
And for those of you using an older version of Windows like XP, that does have IPv6 support as it is included with that OS. Windows 2000 on the other hand does not. But if determined enough, there are ways to get it enabled if you’re a diehard Win2000 fan.
