Santa Fe Digital

The Mayan calendar predicts the end of the age on 12/21/2012.   This doesn’t mean the end of the world, just the beginning of a new cycle, or era.  Coincidentally the Internet and it’s users will enter a new era in 2012.

Emailing and surfing the web are made possible by transferring data in small packets which are routed across the globe using an addressing system called Internet Protocol, or IP.  Each of these packets, much like letters in the mail, contains two key pieces of information:  the address of the originating device and that of the intended recipient.  This system, referred to as IPv4, has been been in use since 1981 and is the foundation for nearly all Internet communications.  (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6)

By the mid 1980s there were about 2000 devices using IPv4 on the Internet.  That was no problem, since IPv4 provides for up to 4.3 billion unique addresses.  Then came the “dot com” boom of the 90s, and by 1995 there were upwards of 6.5 million devices, or hosts, on the Internet.  It was becoming apparent that IPv4 wasn’t as scalable as first thought.  At this rate, IPv4 would soon run out of unique addresses.  Fast forward 16 years and the news headlines are buzzing with the impending “death of IPv4″, sometimes called the IP-calypse, or the ARPocalypse (ARP stands for Address Resolution Protocol).
(source: http://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-make-your-ipv4-network-scalable-to-ipv6/5727015)

Some major consumers of IP addresses include universities, which were given vast blocks of IP addresses in the 80s-90s, and the proliferation of personal computing devices like smart phones, PDAs, and tablet devices.  For example, one person who has a home Internet connection, an office Internet connection, a Blackberry and an iPad is using 4 IPv4 addresses.  With the world population approaching 7 billion it was clear that 4.3 billion IP addresses will not suffice.

Now for a quick, and hopefully painless, explanation of how we got into this predicament.  An IPv4 address looks something like this: 12.260.100.81.  This dotted decimal number represents four bytes, or an 8-bit (binary integer) number.  Four times eight is thirty-two.  Hence this is a 32-bit number.  This is 2³², or 4,294,967,296.

So there are 4,294,967,296 unique IP addresses possible using IPv4.

In contrast, IPv6 — the new Internet addressing system — uses 128-bit addresses.  That’s 2¹²⁸, which is a mind-bogglingly large number:  340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456.

So there are 340 undecillion unique IP addresses possible using IPv6.

To use up every single IPv6 addresses we would need to stack ten billion computers on top of each other over the entire surface (including the seas) of the planet. (source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6)  Problem solved, right?

Not quite.  Much of the infrastructure of the Internet uses only IPv4.

So what do you need to do?   Individual computers and software must be upgraded to support IPv6  and your  network routers must be upgraded to support IPv6 protocols along with IPv4.  Talk to your ISP about getting IPv6 service or about tunneling IPv6 over IPv4; and designing your networks to allow for easy renumbering.

On June 8, 2011 the Internet Society together with several other big companies and organizations will hold World IPv6 Day, a global 24 hour test of IPv6.

If you have question about IPv6 and how it may impact your business or website please feel free to contact us.

email: mike@santafedigital.net
phone:  505.660.7781

Santa Fe Digital today released a completely redesigned website, created using WordPress.  We attended the Blogshop class in Santa Fe this weekend, which made setting up the website a breeze.   

Call 505.660.7781 or send an email to mike[at]santafedigital.net.  We look forward to hearing from you.