January 2011 marks the beginning of the transition of all Net2MAX technologies and deployments progressively from IPv4 to IPv6.
While Net2MAX Labs are fully committed to the support of IPv6, it is interesting to note the background behind the “lack” of IPv4 addresses.
The major reason for the current strong push into IPv6 is that the IPv4 address space is running out. But are we REALLY running out of IPv4 space ?
While it is true that “assignable” IPv4 address are running out rapidly (about 364 million left in Feb-2010 and 298 million left in May-2010), those are DIFFERENT to “unused” IPv4 addresses.
IPv4 Address Wastage
The MAJORITY of IPv4 are actually being wasted!
There are about 4.3 billion IPv4 addresses available and yet ONLY about 1.3 billion IPv4 addresses are being actively used (as of 2010).
Yes … almost 70% of the IPv4 address are NOT even active!
The major reason for such a waste is that the allocation of IPv4 addresses are inequitable do to historical reasons – a lot of early users of the Internet in USA were given IPv4 address in blocks of 16 million addresses each (class A) or blocks of 64 thousand addresses each (class B) which they will never use up.
The result is a ratio of 6 IPv4 addresses per person in the USA yet a ratio of 0.28 IPv4 address per person for the rest of the world.
Asia Pacific suffers first
With rapid growth countries like China and India within the Asia Pacific region, it is not surpricing that that the APNIC is the first to run out of IPv4 addresses.
So … while we may be running out of assignable IPv4 addresses, it is not because they are being “used up”.