IPv6 has been in the works since 1998 to address the shortfall of IP addresses available under IPv4, yet despite its efficiency and security advantages, enterprise uptake is slow
By Josh Fruhlinger
Contributing writer, Network World |
For the most part the dire warnings about running out of internet addresses have ceased because, slowly but surely, migration from the world of Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4) to IPv6 has begun, and software is in place to prevent the address apocalypse that many were predicting.
But before we see where are and where we’re going with IPv6, let’s go back to the early days of internet addressing.
What is IPv6 and why is it important?
IPv6 is the latest version of the Internet Protocol, which identifies devices across the internet so they can be located. Every device that uses the internet is identified through its own IP address in order for internet communication to work. In that respect, it’s just like the street addresses and zip codes you need to know in order to mail a letter.
The previous version, IPv4, uses a 32-bit addressing scheme to support 4.3 billion devices, which was thought to be enough at the time it was implemented. However, with the growth of the internet, personal computers, smartphones and now Internet of Things, it became clear that the world needed more addresses.
Fortunately, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) recognized this nearly 25 years ago. In 1998, it created IPv6, which instead uses 128-bit addressing to support approximately 340 trillion trillion (or 2 to the 128th power). Instead of the IPv4 address method of four sets of one- to three-digit numbers, IPv6 uses eight groups of four hexadecimal digits, separated by colons.
What are the benefits of IPv6?
In its work, the IETF not only added more address space, it included enhancements to IPv6 compared with IPv4. The IPv6 protocol can handle packets more efficiently, improve performance and increase security. It enables internet service providers to reduce the size of their routing tables by making them more hierarchical.
What do IPv6 addresses look like
You're probably familiar with IPv4 addresses, which are written in four parts separated by dots like this: 45.48.241.198. Each part written in conventional Base 10 numerals represents an eight-bit binary number from 0 to 255 (000000 to 1111111, written in binary).
An IPv6 address looks like this: 2620:cc:8000:1c82:544c:cc2e:f2fa:5a9b. Instead of four numbers, there are eight, and they’re separated by colons rather than commas. And yes, they are all numbers. There are letters in there because IPv6 addresses are written in hexadecimal (Base 16) notation, which means 16 different symbols are required to uniquely represent the Base 10 numbers 1-16. The ones used are numerals 0-9 plus letters A-F. Each of these numbers represents a 16-bit binary number ranging from 000000000000 to 11111111111111.
Network address translation (NAT) and IPv6
Adoption of IPv6 has been delayed in part due to network address translation (NAT), which takes private IP addresses and turns them into public IP addresses. That way a corporate machine with a private IP address can send and receive packets from machines located outside the private network that have public IP addresses.
Without NAT, large corporations with thousands or tens of thousands of computers would devour enormous quantities of public IPv4 addresses if they wanted to communicate with the outside world. But those IPv4 addresses are limited and nearing exhaustion to the point of having to be rationed.
NAT helps alleviate the problem. With NAT, thousands of privately addressed computers can be presented to the public internet by a NAT machine such as a firewall or router.
The way NAT works is when a corporate computer with a private IP address sends a packet to a public IP address outside the corporate network, it first goes to the NAT device. The NAT notes the packet’s source and destination addresses in a translation table.
The NAT changes the source address of the packet to the public-facing address of the NAT device and sends it along to the external destination. When a packet replies, the NAT translates the destination address to the private IP address of the computer that initiated the communication. This can be done so that a single public IP address can represent multiple privately addressed computers.
Who is deploying IPv6?
As of March 2022, according to Google, the IPv6 adoption rate globally is around 34%, but in the U.S. it’s at about 46%.
Carrier networks and ISPs have been the first group to start deploying IPv6 on their networks, with mobile networks leading the charge. For example, T-Mobile USA has more than 90% of its traffic going over IPv6 as of March 2002, with Verizon Wireless close behind at 82.63%. Comcast and AT&T have their networks at 70% and 73%, respectively, according to the industry group World Ipv6 Launch. The past few years have seen broader IPv6 adoption in Asia and South America, with India currently standing at about 62% and the Indian wireless carrier Reliance Jio Infocomm topping World Ipv6 Launch's network adoption charts with more than 93%.
Just under 30% of the Alexa Top 1000 websites are currently reachable over IPv6, World IPv6 Launch says, a number that has remained stubbornly stagnant over recent years.
Enterprises are trailing in deployment. For instance, a RIPE Labs report on IPv6 adoption noted that U.S. use of IPv6 actually dropped from 2020 to 2021, and speculated that the reason might be that people who had worked at home early in the COVID-19 pandemic were returning to the office and IPv4-based corporate networks.
Complexity, costs, and time needed to complete a transition are all reasons that corporate IT is gun-shy over migration projects. In addition, many medium-sized and small enterprises outsource their networking needs to service providers, who themselves don't have a strong incentive to migrate in the absence of a push from their customers.
When will more deployments occur?
Enterprise resistance to large-scale IPv6 migration is slowing adoption overall. Patrick Hunter, Charter Communications' director of IT enterprise network and telecom, lays out many of the factors in play, noting that while most network administrators know migration is inevitable, nobody wants to necessarily wants to be a pioneer if the risk is causing problems for their own networks and applications.
As he puts it, admins have the attitude of "I’m not going to break things and make life difficult just because some insist everyone should hurry to the new protocol." Not all companies are resisting—Amazon is migrating its serverless and container AWS workloads to IPv6. But inertia, plus the fact that, as noted, widespread NAT use has staved off an IPv4 apocalypse, have reduced the incentives to make the move. The transition may not be complete until 2030 or later.
Nevertheless, as the price of IPv4 addresses begin to drop, the Internet Society suggests that enterprises sell off their existing IPv4 addresses to help fund IPv6 deployment. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has done this, according to a note posted on GitHub. The university concluded that 8 million of its IPv4 addresses were “excess” and could be sold without impacting current or future needs since it also holds 20 nonillion IPv6 addresses. (A nonillion is the numeral one followed by 30 zeroes.)
In addition, as more deployments occur, more companies will start charging for the use of IPv4 addresses, while providing IPv6 services for free. UK-based ISP Mythic Beasts says “IPv6 connectivity comes as standard,” while “IPv4 connectivity is an optional extra.”
Pushing for a faster transition will take government action, though many Western governments don't have this on their to-do list. One country moving to IPv6 in a big way is China. In 2021, the Cyberspace Administration of China unveiled an ambitious roadmap, aiming to have 800 million active IPv6 users by the end of 2025.
When will IPv4 be “shut off”?
Most of the world “ran out” of new IPv4 addresses between 2011 and 2018 – but we won’t completely be out of them as IPv4 addresses get sold and re-used, and any leftover addresses will be used for IPv6 transitions.
There’s no official switch-off date, so people shouldn’t be worried that their internet access will suddenly go away one day. As more networks transition, more content sites support IPv6 and more end users upgrade their equipment for IPv6 capabilities, the world will slowly move away from IPv4.
Why is there no IPv5?
There was an IPv5 that was also known as Internet Stream Protocol, abbreviated simply as ST. It was designed for connection-oriented communications across IP networks with the intent of supporting voice and video.
It was successful at that task, and was used experimentally. One shortcoming that undermined its popular use was its 32-bit address scheme – the same scheme used by IPv4. As a result, it had the same problem that IPv4 had – a limited number of possible IP addresses. That led to the development and eventual adoption of IPv6. Even though IPv5 was never adopted publicly, it had used up the name IPv5.
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FAQs
What is IPv6 and why is adoption taking so long? ›
Adoption of IPv6 has been delayed in part due to network address translation (NAT), which takes private IP addresses and turns them into public IP addresses.
Why did IPv6 take so long? ›IPv6 was born over twenty years ago. During all this time, it has not become widespread, at least its implementation is progressing rather slowly. As you know, today there is a lack of IPv4 addresses and this is the key problem of this technology.
What is IPv6 explained? ›An IPv6 address is a 128-bit alphanumeric value that identifies an endpoint device in an Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) network. IPv6 is the successor to a previous addressing infrastructure, IPv4, which had limitations IPv6 was designed to overcome.
What is IPv6 and why is it necessary quizlet? ›IPv6 (also called IP Next Generation or IPng) provides a long-term solution to the problem of address space exhaustion. Its 128- bit addressing scheme has space for 340 undecillion unique addresses.
What is the main reason why IPv6 usages adoption is not as popular as it should be? ›Perhaps the primary reason IPv6 has been slow to take hold is because of network address translation (NAT), which has the ability to take a collection of private IP addresses and make them public.
What is the importance of IPv6? ›IPv6 is the “next generation” of IP, which provides a vastly expanded address space. Using IPv6, the Internet will be able to grow to millions of times its current size, in terms of the numbers of people, devices and objects connected to it1.
What are the challenges of adopting IPv6? ›Difficulty in detecting and managing unknown or unauthorized IPv6 assets on existing IPv4 production networks. The added complexity of operating parallel IPv4 and IPv6 networks. A lack of IPv6 maturity in security products. The proliferation of IPv6 and IPv4 tunnels can complicate defenses.
What are the problems with IPv6? ›Due to the size of the IPv6 address, scanning the entire segment is much tougher and takes longer than scanning IPv4. Due to this, smurf-type attacks can be a problem, which is why it's advisable to filter out unnecessary traffic.
How long does an IPv6 address take? ›An IPv6 address is 128 bits in length and consists of eight, 16-bit fields, with each field bounded by a colon. Each field must contain a hexadecimal number, in contrast to the dotted-decimal notation of IPv4 addresses.
What is example of IPv6? ›The following are examples of valid IPv6 (normal) addresses: 2001:db8:3333:4444:5555:6666:7777:8888. 2001:db8:3333:4444:CCCC:DDDD:EEEE:FFFF.
What is the main advantage of the IPv6 format for IP addresses? ›
More Efficient Routing – IPv6 reduces the size of routing tables and makes routing more efficient and hierarchical. In IPv6 networks, fragmentation is handled by the source device, rather than a router, using a protocol for discovery of the path's maximum transmission unit.
What is IPv6 quizlet? ›IP version 6, or IPv6, the successor to IPv4, is an addressing scheme that increases the available pool. of IP addresses by implementing a 128-bit binary address space. This equates to 340 trillion trillion. trillion addresses. IPv6 also includes new features, such as simplified address headers, hierarchical.
What are three benefits of using IPv6? ›- No more NAT (Network Address Translation)
- Auto-configuration.
- No more private address collisions.
- Better multicast routing.
- Simpler header format.
- Simplified, more efficient routing.
- True quality of service (QoS), also called "flow labeling"
- Built-in authentication and privacy support.
IPv6 was specifically designed to solve address space exhaustion. Experts began to point out concerns about the exhaustion problem even in the 1980s. In addition, shortly after the launch of IPv4, its limitations in terms of scalability and capability became apparent.
What is the adoption rate of IPv6? ›As of May 2022, Reliance had an IPv6 adoption rate of over 92%. Department of Telecom (DoT) has set the below deadline to complete the transition to IPv6. All Government organisations should complete IPv6 transition and migration of their websites on IPv6 latest by 30 June 2022.
Why did IPv6 fail? ›The problem is that IPv6 addresses are still second-class citizens on the Internet. So what have users done to get round the problem? Mostly companies have acquired and reused IPv4 addresses that were currently unused. Other alternatives include reusing IPv4 addresses with NAT to extend the addressing capabilities.
What is one of the challenges to widespread implementation of IPv6? ›The lack of compatibility requires operators to run IPv4 and IPv6 concurrently for the foreseeable future. This means a higher cost in maintenance now, with benefits becoming only visible when other networks are also switching to IPv6.
Why is it difficult to change from IPv4 to IPv6? ›The first big problem with the change from IPv4 to IPv6 is that one variety of IP data can't travel on a network set up to handle the other variety.
Does IPv6 slow down a network? ›How do IPv4 and IPv6 compare when it comes to speed? The security blog Sucuri ran a series of tests in which they found that in direct connections, IPv4 and IPv6 delivered the same speed.
Is IPv6 a security risk? ›First, the good news: IPv6 as a protocol suite isn't inherently more or less secure than its predecessor. Just as with IPv4, the vast majority of security incidents arise from design and implementation issues rather than weaknesses in the underlying technology.
What happens if IPv6 has no Internet access? ›
The “IPv6 no internet access” problem may occur if you are using the wrong Ethernet driver or it's out of date. So you should update your Ethernet driver to see if it fixes your problem. If you don't have the time, patience or skills to update the driver manually, you can do it automatically with Driver Easy.
Does IPv6 have time to live? ›In the IPv6 header, it is the 8th octet of 40. The maximum TTL value is 255, the maximum value of a single octet. A recommended initial value is 64. The time-to-live value can be thought of as an upper bound on the time that an IP datagram can exist in an Internet system.
Does IPv6 mean faster internet? ›IPv6 is faster than IPv4 in network devices because it lacks network-address translation (NAT). Using IPv6 is a better choice for people that require high speed for their network processing.
What was the reason that IPv6 was introduced? ›IPv6 was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to deal with the long-anticipated problem of IPv4 address exhaustion, and is intended to replace IPv4. In December 1998, IPv6 became a Draft Standard for the IETF, which subsequently ratified it as an Internet Standard on 14 July 2017.
What devices use IPv6? ›All major operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS and Android support IPv6, more-and-more software applications are IPv6-ready, and those available on Apple's App Store must be IPv6 capable.
How does IPv6 communicate? ›A host in IPv6 network is capable of auto-configuring itself with a unique link-local address. As soon as host gets an IPv6 address, it joins a number of multicast groups. All communications related to that segment take place on those multicast addresses only.
What type of connection is IPv6? ›There are two main types of IPv6 WAN connectivity: native (Auto and Static) and tunneling over IPv4 (6to4, 6in4, and 6rd).
Why do we prefer IPv6 over IPv4? ›IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) is the next version after IPv4. Instead of the 32 bits used by IPv4 for addressing, IPv6 uses 128 bits for the same purpose - which theoretically makes it possible to assign 2 128 addresses - hence, it offers long term solutions to most of the problems that emerged while using IPv4.
Why is IPv6 more preferred than IPv4? ›The Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is more advanced and has better features compared to IPv4. It has the capability to provide an infinite number of addresses. It is replacing IPv4 to accommodate the growing number of networks worldwide and help solve the IP address exhaustion problem.
Why does IPv6 have better security? ›IPv6 is also more secure for name resolution. The Secure Neighbor Discovery (SEND) protocol enables cryptographic confirmation of a host's identity upon connection, making naming-based attacks more difficult. This is not a replacement for verification at the application or service level but offers additional security.
What are the most common obstacles to IPv6 adoption? ›
Huge costs and lack of training further impede IPv6 adoption
Needless to say, technical challenges and expensive implementation might discourage many businesses from switching to IPv6. Therefore, we are likely to continue using IPv4 along with IPv6 for many years to come.
The first big problem with the change from IPv4 to IPv6 is that one variety of IP data can't travel on a network set up to handle the other variety.
What is the status of IPv6 adoption? ›As of May 2022, Reliance had an IPv6 adoption rate of over 92%. Department of Telecom (DoT) has set the below deadline to complete the transition to IPv6. All Government organisations should complete IPv6 transition and migration of their websites on IPv6 latest by 30 June 2022.
Why is IPv6 not still used? ›Since IPv6 lacks particular routing protocol support, it relies solely on static routes. As a result, it is less popular than IPv4. In IPv4, widespread use of NAT (Network Address Translation) devices allows a single NAT address to mask thousands of addresses, enhancing end-to-end integrity and performance.
What are the three main benefits of implementing IPv6? ›- No more NAT (Network Address Translation)
- Auto-configuration.
- No more private address collisions.
- Better multicast routing.
- Simpler header format.
- Simplified, more efficient routing.
- True quality of service (QoS), also called "flow labeling"
- Built-in authentication and privacy support.
The migration from IPv4 to IPv6 will take time and resources. Network devices will be upgraded and reconfigured, applications will be changed to support the new protocol, and client devices will be upgraded. While all this is going on, business operations will have to continue without disruption.
When was IPv6 adopted? ›IPv6 was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to deal with the long-anticipated problem of IPv4 address exhaustion, and is intended to replace IPv4. In December 1998, IPv6 became a Draft Standard for the IETF, which subsequently ratified it as an Internet Standard on 14 July 2017.