The IPv6 shepherd story

For almost 10 years now, IPv6 has been the revolution that is just around the corner but never seems to actually materialize. I would say that now is the moment, but this has been said so many times in the past that it reminds me of the story with the shepherd that cried "wolf" and was believed by none when the wolf actually appeared. Well, IPv6 is certainly not a bad development, but it does seem to have been predicted so often that the predictions have been discredited.

For those people who have not heard of IPv6 before, it is the protocol that is destined to replace the currently used IPv4, with its usual IP addresses that look like 150.110.60.8. Our new IPv6 addresses look like this: 2001:648:800:1:204:75ff:feb3:36a0 (yes, they are uglier, but that's why they come in abundance: sixty thousand trillion trillion times more than the total available IPv4 addresses). Why are they so many? Because the 4 billion IPv4 addresses that once seemed infinite some years ago were about to be exhausted. So the IETF that designed it, decided that IPv6 should have more address space than anyone could ever expect to be necessary, just to be sure.

Perhaps predictably, the Internet did not wait for IETF to finalize, test and deploy the new Internet Protocol. It just went ahead finding hacks to solve the immediate problem, and one such solution proved to be quite successful: NAT. Actually, it was so successful that some people even believe that IPv6 will never happen, because despite NAT's shortcomings (and they are many), it has relieved the IP address shortage that was the main factor pushing the Internet towards IPv6.

I am nevertheless confident that it's time has come, and a basic reason is the maturity that surrounds the new Internet Protocol nowadays. IPv6 support is bundled in Windows XP, as has been the case with Linux and *BSD for quite some time. Cisco is also a major promoter of IPv6, as most of its competitor router manufacturing companies. There are all types of applications that work over IPv6, especially in the Linux/BSD world. But most important, NAT is simply not sufficient anymore. With huge countries like China and India progressing towards becoming major economic powers and devices like cell phones becoming essentially small computing gadgets, IP addresses for everyone and everything are necessary. Nothing can provide them as easily and effectively as IPv6.