Internet IP Addressing Shake-Up Begins

[GhostShip]

"Look ma we are running out of IP addresses" 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7221758.stm

The first big steps on the road to overhauling the net's core addressing system have been taken.
On Monday the master address books for the net are being updated to include records prepared in a new format known as IP version 6.
Widespread use of this format will end the shortage of addresses that sites can be given.
The net's current addressing scheme is expected to exhaust the pool of unallocated addresses by 2011.

Paul Twomey, president of Icann which oversees the addressing system, told the BBC News website there was a need to start moving to IPv6.
"There's pressure for people to make the conversion to IPv6," he said. "We're pushing this as a major issue."
The reason for the urgency, he said, was because the unallocated addresses from the total of 4,294,967,296 possible with IPv4 was rapidly running out.
"We're down to 14% of the unallocated addresses out of the whole pool for version 4," he said.

For a long while, he said, the effects on consumers would be minimal though eventually home routers may have to be upgraded or swapped so they can use the longer addresses

It's of course pleasing to see more and more folks joining the online community and I,m sure one day in the future they may even have to upgrade the system again to cope with demand, but lets face it, thats the never ending trail of "progress" for you folks 

[Cobra]

The old (current) setup of IPv4 is one of the last, undersight, Y2K bug issues in a sense.

The designers of the system probably thought "This will end up public someday, but we will have 4 billion addresses for users. It will take a LONG time before they are all used up... if ever. After all, how popular could this ever be?"


@ GhostShip: They MAY have to upgrade again someday, but I would suspect only so if millions of addresses are being meaninglessly wasted per person or company like water in the tropics.


For those who do not understand just how large of a change this will be, IPv4 addresses are 32-bit. That's 2³² or 4,294,967,296 addresses as stated in the article.

IPv6 will use 128-bit addresses. That translates to 2¹²⁸ or 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 available addresses.

[White Stripes]

so what happenes to the IPv4 only winmx when this switch happenes....

[Cobra]

The current intention of IPv6 is to be an addition -- not a replacement -- for IPv4. Since the IPv4 technology is already there, there is no reason to get rid of it for quite a while. So this should not affect WinMX barring some massive change in the system or loss of cache server IP's (however WinMX works).

One reason to keep IPv4 around is due to areas that still have only slow traffic. The 128-bit headers are obviously larger than the current 32-bit ones which would mean data in those areas would travel noticeably slower than before.


And just for the fun of it, here is an old/current IP address:

http: // 64.233.161.19   (Google)

New IP addresses will look more this:

http: // 2001:0db8:3c4d:0015:0:0:abcd:ef12
or shortcutted as a result of the zero-blocks to:
http: // 2001:0db8:3c4d:0015::abcd:ef12