Is IPv4 running out of gas — er, address space?. EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet reports on the latest developments and the IPv6 alternative.
IPv4 address space will not be exhausted in 2010 as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) had once forecast. But that doesn
’
t mean that network managers or even consumer electronics vendors should sit on the sidelines.
This week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the American Registry for Internet Names (ARIN) is advocating that vendors start making the move to IPv6 now.
IPv4 technology uses a 32-bit address space providing capacity for 4.3 billion IP addresses. The next-generation IPv6 system has a 128-bit address space, providing a capacity orders of magnitude larger (the number of addresses IPv6 could support can be expressed as: 34 x 10 to the 38th power, or 340 trillion trillion trillion).