What happened to IPV4 Address Crisis?

Read it here:

http://features.techworld.com/networking/3502401/whatever-happened-to-the-ipv4-address-crisis/


The day of reckoning still looms -- it's just been pushed out as the major Internet players have developed ingenious ways to stretch those available numbers. But these conservation efforts can only work for so long.

IPv6 uses a 128-bit address space -- that is, 2^128 -- yielding far more potential addresses than IPv4's 32-bit scheme, and in fact more addresses than there are grains of sand in the Earth's crust.

So, why hasn't everyone just switched over to IPv6?

Well, IPv6 is not backward compatible with IPv4, meaning network operators need to run a dual stack IPv4/IPv6 network for years to come. And for IPv6 to work, it needs to be implemented end to end, meaning IPv6 has to be enabled by network hardware vendors, transit providers, access providers, content providers, and endpoint hardware makers.

Since there's no economic incentive to being the first to invest in revamping your protocol support, many hardware and service providers stood on the sidelines and waited for momentum to build.

For enterprises, it made no sense to upgrade to IPv6 if their ISPs were still running IPv4. As John Brzozowski, fellow and chief architect for IPv6 at Comcast Cable, puts it: We had a chicken-and-egg problem. "Service providers didn't want to implement IPv6 because the content providers weren't there, and content providers didn't want to implement it because the service providers weren't there."

Plus, there were ways to avoid having to face the IPv6 music. One common technique iscarrier-grade network (CGN) address translation (NAT), which translates private IP addresses within a carrier's network to a smaller number of public IP addresses in much the same way that ordinary NAT lets individuals and organisations use multiple internal IP addresses.

However, CGN brings with it a number of issues that limit its appeal. For one thing, it's expensive for carriers, and the money they spend on it could be more productively applied to IPv6-ready hardware. For another, a great deal of Internet infrastructure relies on the premise that a single public IP address uniquely identifies a carrier subscriber. CGN breaks that assumption, which means that it breaks geolocation services and impedes law enforcement organisations' ability to identify users.