Serendipity35

Did you know that the most of the Internet runs on IP version 4? That's was the version of the Internet Protocol that first saw widespread use, and it was standardized in 1981. So, since then it has been powering the expansion of the Internet.

Like Y2K, technologists realized along the way that IPv4 would have problems with that expansion at some point. The problem is address space. Without getting too tech (and get myself in trouble) the IPv4 has a 32-bit field, so there can be somewhere over four billion IP addresses on the same network.

Back in 1981, that seemed like enough for a network - unless you could have imagined that by now there would be 3 billion mobile phones worldwide in addition to all those computers.

Hasn't anyone been doing anything about this?

Turns out that IPv6 came around in 1996. That has a lot more space and the thought was that as it was adopted enough IP nodes would move across to it and lessen the address crunch and IPv4 would fade away. But that hasn't happened.

Some people predict IPv4 will still be important for ten or twenty years even though the address space will probably run out long before that.

Something that many people in education can identify with as far as software goes is that  IPv6 won't solve things right away, and we'll have to run (and support) both versions. Sounds familiar to campus users and IT staffers.

It even starts to sound like a parallel story to fossil fuels. Who uses most IPv4 addresses? The developed world. Who has the greatest demand for new addresses? Developing world. Supply. Demand.

This is network technology, and it is well beyond my tech knowledge base. When I did some cursory searching, I found information like this presentation by Randy Bush on IPv6 that seems to contradict some of the "myths" I have read in other places. I guess my interest in writing about this is not so much to sound the alarm, as it is to remind you of the incredibly rapid growth of these technologies and the unpredictability of where we will be in a few years. Kind of makes you feel nostalgic for the days when you could be safe in picking a textbook that would be good for the next ten years.