Moving on up

Imagine a world where your company could use only single-digit telephone extensions for its employees.

If you had fewer than 10 employees, that wouldn't be a problem. However, most companies would quickly run into a logistical nightmare.

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That's a situation that Internet users will face in the near future, based on the current Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4), which supports just under 4.3 billion Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. That may seem like a lot, but it's much less than the number of human beings currently on planet Earth, let alone the growing number of cell phones, PDAs, Internet phones and even refrigerators that are being equipped with Internet access.

In reality, the situation isn't quite as bad as it sounds, thanks to the proliferation of routers that support Network Address Translation (NAT).

Even a consumer-grade router can take the single "external" IP address assigned to you by your Internet provider and translate it into enough "internal" IP addresses to meet the needs of all the computers on your network. Still, current projections of Internet growth suggest that the pool of available IP addresses will be exhausted by the year 2013. (Source: bgp.potaroo.net/ipv4)

Those statistics are compelling enough that the U.S. Office of Management and Budget has mandated that all federal agencies must switch to the next-generation Internet protocol, IPv6, by 2008. (Version 5 had already been assigned to another experimental protocol that was never finalized.) At present, it's doubtful that goal will be met, as only the Department of Defense has a formal plan in place for the transition.

IPv6 will allow for 340 undecillion (340 trillion trillion trillion) unique IP addresses, enough to last humanity and all its networked gadgets a very long while.

But having an exponentially larger pool of available addresses isn't the only advantage. Some technologies such as VoIP (see "Tech Talk," July 2006) and streaming media are hindered by the use of NAT and would benefit greatly from the direct routing offered by IPv6.

Despite the federal mandate and the progress made by IPv6 test beds such as the Moonv6 Project (www.moonv6.org), adoption of IPv6 in the United States is close to zero. In fact, the major drive behind IPv6 is coming from the Far East; Japan, China and South Korea have joined forces to push forward with nationwide deployment of IPv6 technology, starting this year.

Most companies still see IPv6 as something to consider a long way down the road, although major vendors like Cisco are busy gearing up to provide IPv6 routers and switches. Microsoft has promised full IPv6 support in Windows Vista. Mac OS X has supported IPv6 for a while.

If your company decides to move forward with IPv6, you'll face some obstacles, like architectural limitations and incomplete support from Internet backbone providers. And it may seem absurd to give up dependence on NAT (which offers the benefit of masking your internal network's IP addresses) just to move to a protocol that assigns a public IP address to each computer. However, it's not too early to start building an effective transition plan so that your company will be ready for the inevitable switch.