Abstract: The Internet is in transition. The original address
space, IPv4, is nearly exhausted; the Internet is in the progress of
migrating to the new IPv6 address space.
The Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) developed in the late 1970s has
the capacity for about 4 billion unique addresses. It would have been
hard to imagine in the 1970s that 4 billion addresses were not going to
be enough. But by the early 1990s, Internet engineers recognized that
the supply of addresses was relatively limited compared to likely
demand, and they set to work designing a successor to IPv4. They
developed a new Internet Protocol, IPv6, with a vastly increased address
space: 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses.
Broadband Internet access has become essential to the United States and
the rest of the world. The exhaustion of IPv4 addresses and the
transition to IPv6 could result in significant, but not insurmountable,
problems for broadband Internet services. In the short term, to permit
the network to continue to grow, engineers have developed a series of
kludges. These kludges include more efficient use of the IPv4 address
resource, conservation, and the sharing of IPv4 addresses through the
use of Network Address Translation (NAT). While these provide partial
mitigation for IPv4 exhaustion, they are not a long-term solution,
increase network costs, and merely postpone some of the consequences of
address exhaustion without solving the underlying problem. Some of these
fixes break end-to-end connectivity, impairing innovation and hampering
applications, degrading network performance, and resulting in an
inferior version of the Internet. These kludges require capital
investment and ongoing operational costs by network service providers,
diverting investment from other business objectives. Network operators
will be confronted with increased costs to offer potentially inferior
service.
The short term solutions are necessary because there is not enough time
to completely migrate the entire public Internet to "native IPv6" where
end users can communicate entirely via IPv6. Network protocol
transitions require significant work and investment, and with the
exhaustion of IPv4 addresses looming, there is insufficient time to
complete the full IPv6 transition.
But the short-term solutions are problematic. The "solution to the
solution" is to complete the transition to a native IPv6 network. A
native IPv6 network will restore end-to-end connectivity with a vastly
expanded address space, will improve network performance, and should
decrease costs. Completing the transition of the public Internet to IPv6
will take time.
To read this FCC article in full, see:
ssrn.com/abstract=1735456
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