Internet networks trudge forward on the slow adoption of IPv6

“IPv6 Google DNS” by MedithIT. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

The Internet Protocol (IP) communications standard enables the routing of online traffic, supporting one of the very basic functions of the Internet. Every device that connects to a network is given an IP address which, somewhat like a mailing address, indicates the destination for data packets being sent through a network. Since the earliest days of the Internet, computing devices have utilized 32-bit IP addresses available through Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4), which has been around since the early 1980s and continues to be the IP version which routes the vast majority of Internet traffic.

IP addresses are purchased by Internet service providers from regional Internet registries. In April 2014, the regional Internet registry for North America, the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), announced that it was entering its final phase of its IPv4 countdown plan, having less than 17 million IP addresses remaining to distribute for new Internet-connected devices. Recently, ARIN created a waitlist for those ISPs that want new IP addresses because it has run through its entire inventory of IPv4 addresses.

The 32-bit nature of IPv4 means that this version of Internet Protocol can support a maximum of roughly 4.3 billion IP addresses. But Internet usage is exploding among the more than 7 billion people inhabiting the globe. As we’ve reported here, the growing Internet of Things sector is expected to include 50 billion devices by the year 2050. How are we to accommodate our Internet-connected toothbrushes and refrigerators with only a fraction of the IP addresses necessary for ubiquitous Internet access?

The answer comes in the newest version of Internet Protocol development, known as Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). IPv6 is a 128-bit communications protocol, which supports a nearly limitless address space of addresses number 2 to the 128th power, an astronomical number which has also been expressed as “340 billion billion billion billion.” There’s plenty of elbow room for the Internet of Things once IPv6 takes root.

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There are a growing number of devices which are already optimized for IPv6 networking communications. Readers can visit this website to test their connectivity for IPv6. As of early July, Google reports that about seven percent of all Internet traffic accessing its website is doing so using IPv6-enabled devices.

A fact sheet distributed by the Internet Society, an international non-profit organization based in Switzerland, points out a number of issues with refusing to adopt IPv6 connectivity now that the final threshold for IPv4 addresses has been passed. Without a dedicated IP address, a device cannot reliably connect to networked resources. Sharing IP addresses, which could have been a reality without the development of IPv6, could have posed a huge privacy concern for many. Voice over IP (VoIP) or video over IP communications could have also become cumbersome as IPv4 Internet traffic continues to slow.

IPv6 offers several benefits besides plenty of new IP addresses preventing device owners from having to share IP addresses. Effectively managed IPv6 networks can reduce the amount of information stored on network devices for routing packets to a destination, improving network performance. Hosts can generate their own IP addresses instead of waiting for a manual input from network administrators. IPv6 adoption also ends the need to use network address translation techniques for remapping an IP address space, which became necessary with the exhaustion of addresses in IPv4.

For the typical consumer, there won’t be much that will be noticed during this transition in IP standards. There are devices being built today which include hardware to run on dual-stack networks which process both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic and the transition is happening in such a way that IPv4 addresses will still be able to use the Internet for quite some time yet. Network system administrators at companies all over the world, however, will have to develop transition plans which ensure that they become IPv6-compliant to handle the coming influx of Internet-enabled devices. Subnetting, or the creation of multiple logical networks that exist within a single network, must be performed carefully to ensure that virtual networks don’t become bogged down by too many device connections.

One drawback of the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition that has been noted is a security vulnerability which is being referred to as “IPv6 leakage.” As websites accessible online make the switch to IPv6 communications ahead of virtual private networks (VPNs), which provide encrypted Internet connections for greater security, some digital communications are left vulnerable because the VPN can only encrypt IPv4 transmissions. Researchers from the Queen Mary University of London who spotted the flaw note that the privacy concern doesn’t occur when accessing websites which have been configured with HTTPS security measures.

The market adoption of IPv6-compatible devices is expected to continue slowly. About one-quarter of the world’s Internet traffic will be carried on the IPv6 protocol by 2019 according to a recent report issued by networking equipment manufacturer Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) In that same year, IPv6 traffic is expected to increase to 45.7 exabytes per month, up from 2.6 exabytes per month in 2014; one exabyte is equivalent to 1,000,000,000,000 megabytes. Just more than 40 percent of the world’s devices will be IPv6-capable by 2019, including 4 billion fixed devices and 6 billion mobile devices.

Interestingly, one of the world’s largest tech developers, which seems to have its hands in every sector of technological innovation imaginable, has actually been accused of being too slow in their ability to incorporate the IPv6 protocol. Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) hadn’t shipped a single Android phone which supports the dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) used for IPv6, which is DHCPv6, through the end of June. This is causing some network administrators to consider an IPv6 deployment plan which doesn’t incorporate Android devices, which will make it difficult for some enterprises utilizing a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) model to chart a course forward. Google argues that IPv6 adoption would cause issues with Android applications which use IPv4 traffic, but it seems that Apple, Linux and others do not have that same problem. Google’s stance is made more intriguing by a web page on the Google.com domain which depicts the company as in favor of IPv6 adoption: “At Google we believe that IPv6 is essential to the continued health and growth of the Internet and that by allowing all devices to talk to each other directly, IPv6 enables new innovative services.”