I was planning to write a nice technical post on IPv6 migration techniques but I had a few cans of red bull and my mind has gone a wander.

Whenever IPv6 is mentioned it always causes a big rift in opinions, alot of people say that IPv4 will be totally deleted in 3 years +/-6months, according to RIPE who are responsible for IP & BGP AS allocation Europe. And the next Google’s and startups won’t be able to get IPv4 space and due to its rarity many people are concerned its going to become a commodity where companies will be bought/sold for their address space, there could even a potential black market in IPv4 space? Emerging countries such as Africa & China which are coming online will need huge allocations of address space to fulfill their needs, and mobile devices such as iPhones and internet devices everywhere becoming more popular there is a growing need. With NAT/PAT apparently harming innovation as there is a need for end to end addressing transparency, there is a clear need for more address.

But is IPv6 the answer?

Whenever IPv6 is mentioned it always causes a big rift in opinions, some people simply don’t believe that every host on the internet will ever change its TCP/IP stack for IPv6 as that change is a once in a lifetime opportunity and there is not a viable business reason to do so at the moment.

Vince Fuller who is a Senior Technical Consultant at Cisco Systems discussed recently that IPv6 is not the complete answer as although it solves the address limitations it does not solve the scalability issues issues we will eventually face with massive routing tables. I was lucky enough to speak to him at RIPE 56 and heard his presentation on a possible solution to some of the issues with Locater Id Separation (LISP).

Its going to be really interesting in the next few years to watch IPv4 “hit the wall”, and to see if it will be adopted and how long it will take, I wonder if it will become the chicken and egg conundrum of what will come first applications & websites or the user base?