In the news this past week was an article notifying on the last block of IPv4 addresses having been sold in Florida.
What does that mean?
Well, it means that for ISP’s, mobile and home users the transition to IPv6 has become fairly imminent.
When the Internet was born, a mistake was made by the designers, pretty much like the mistake that led to the wave of fear about the 2K bug.
This time, the fault was a lack of imagination in seeing how huge the Internet would become and continue to expand. So, a new protocol was written called IPv6. The problem is that these new addresses won’t be accessible to IPv4 users. Consequently, a lot of changes will arrive in coming days, months, and years.
IPv4 addresses are 32-bit numbers, meaning that there are 4.3 billion possible addresses (232). IPv6 addresses are 128-bit numbers (2128 ), meaning that the number of possible addresses is vastly larger.
What does this mean for me?:
For now, you don’t have a lot to worry about. If your router is dual stacked, you can sit back and relax because if your computer has an OS of XPSP3 or later, you’re covered. It will mean equipment upgrades at the ISP level and higher will be necessary. That’ll raise costs to you as well.
In fact, a group of 25 folks in Denver, CO have been given dual stacked routers from Comcast very recently to see how that solution will work. These will solve problems without “tunneling” software. You’ll be seeing more of this in the future.