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<h1><b><font size=6 color=black face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
24.0pt;color:black'> </span></font>Your number’s up<o:p></o:p></b></h1>
<p class=info><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>Jun
5th 2008<br>
>From <em><i><font face="Times New Roman">The Economist</font></i></em> print
edition<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<h2><b><font size=5 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:18.0pt'>Networking:
The internet will run out of addresses unless a new numbering system is
adopted. After years of inaction, there are now signs of progress<o:p></o:p></span></font></b></h2>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>NOBODY
would expect a city water system designed for 1m residents to be able to handle
a 1,000-fold increase in population in just a few years. Yet that is what the
internet’s fundamental addressing scheme has had to accommodate. When the
network was first established there were only a handful of computer centres in <st1:place
w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">America</st1:country-region></st1:place>.
Instead of choosing a numbering system that could support a few thousand or
million addresses, the internet’s designers foresightedly opted for one
that could handle 4 billion. But now even that is not enough. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>The
addressing system, called internet protocol version 4 (IPv4), cannot keep up
with the flood of computers, mobile phones, hand-held gadgets, games consoles
and even cars and refrigerators flooding onto the network. Nearly 85% of
available addresses are already in use; if this trend continues they will run
out by 2011, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a
think-tank for rich countries, warned in May.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
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color=black face=Arial><span style='font-size:12.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>The
shortage is not the only problem; so too is growing complexity. IPv4 addresses are
allocated in blocks to network operators. The path to reach each network is
published on a global list that is constantly updated. Big computers, called
routers, use these entries to guide the flow of traffic across the internet.
But as more devices and networks link to the internet, it becomes necessary to
subdivide the address blocks into ever-smaller units. This risks overtaxing the
millions of routers that handle the internet’s traffic, which must be
regularly upgraded to keep up. Were there no alternative to IPv4, parts of the
internet would eventually suffer from sporadic outages, warns Paul Vixie, a
network engineer who wrote the software the internet uses to translate domain
names (such as <a href="http://www.economist.com/" target="_blank"
title=" (opens in a new window) ">economist.com</a>) into their underlying IPv4
addresses.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>Fortunately
a new system does exist, called internet protocol version 6, or IPv6. (Version
5 was a short-lived experimental system.) IPv6 provides 3.4x10<sup>38</sup> (4
billion to the fourth power) addresses. This means IPv6 addresses can be
allocated to network operators and companies in much larger quantities. It also
provides a clean slate for establishing new paths over the internet, reducing
complexity. But switching means upgrading millions of devices.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>In fact,
support for IPv6 is already widely available in software and hardware, but it
has not been used much. Only a few research institutions and the American
government took the IPv6 plunge early on. (In <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region
w:st="on">America</st1:country-region></st1:place> all federal agencies must
be capable of using IPv6 by June 30th 2008, by executive order.)<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>But in
recent months the pace of change has picked up. In February Mr Vixie and others
who operate the “root nameservers”—the central computers that
translate domain names into internet addresses—flipped a switch that
means domain names can now map onto IPv6 addresses. This may herald more
widespread adoption of the new protocol, since it means that any organisation
can use IPv6 addresses with its domain names, and users can access them without
special rigging. Google was one of the first widely used sites to take public
advantage of this, setting up ipv6.google.com, which maps to an IPv6 address
for its home page. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>Support
for IPv6 is already baked into most popular operating-system software. It is
incorporated into Windows XP and <st1:place w:st="on">Vista</st1:place>, Mac OS
X 10.3 “Panther” and later, and many flavours of Unix and Linux.
But operating systems are only the taps of the plumbing system: a house’s
other fixtures (like set-top boxes), inside pipes (broadband modems and
routers), and feeder pipes (backbone routers) must also be upgraded for the
full benefits of IPv6 to become available. In the meantime, IPv4 and IPv6 can
co-exist by smuggling data addressed in one form inside packages addressed with
the other.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>The cost
of the upgrade will be distributed across the internet’s many users, from
consumers to companies to network operators, and will mostly be a gradual
process. “The internet itself has grown organically—it’s not
possible to implement or mandate a change across the network,” says
Leslie Daigle, chief internet-technology officer at the <a
href="http://www.isoc.org/" target="_blank" title=" (opens in a new window) ">Internet
Society</a>, a non-profit body that supports the development of internet
standards. But some big network operators may have to upgrade in order to
accommodate more devices. Comcast, an American cable operator, realised in 2005
that it might need 100m IP addresses by 2008, but would be able to get perhaps
one-tenth of that number of IPv4 addresses. It has since converted the core of
its network to IPv6.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>Pressure
to convert entire broadband networks to IPv6, right down to individual PCs, may
come from an unexpected source, says Mr Vixie. “First-person,
shoot-’em-up gaming and peer-to-peer file sharing works better if IPv6 is
used,” he notes. And once consumers get a taste of the benefits, he says,
the adoption of IPv6 should take off dramatically. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
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