IPv6 Take-Up Said Hampered by Lack of Benefits to Users, Cost

The number of available IPv4 addresses has dipped below 10 percent, ICANN said. There are just 24 address blocks, each with about 16 million IP addresses, that haven’t been allocated to the world’s Regional Internet Registries (RIRs), it said. The new protocol has a capacity of 300 trillion trillion trillion possible addresses, it said. The smallest block of IPv6 addresses an ISP will allocate contains more than 18 million trillion Internet addresses, it said.

IPv6 offers several advantages, ICANN said. There will be loads of IP addresses for everyone, allowing every machine or device to have its own online location. As the “Internet of Things” expands, IPv6 will provide enough addresses for the objects to make alternative network addressing schemes unnecessary. And the larger space will open the door to a new generation of online devices.

“IPv6 is the future of the Internet,” said ICANN President Rod Beckstrom. The limited number of IPv4 addresses “will not allow us enough resources to achieve the ambitions we all hold for global Internet access,” said Axel Pawlik, who chairs the Number Resource Organization that coordinates the RIRs.

Nothing is preventing take-up except ISPs’ lack of incentive to change while IPv4 addresses are still available, said Leo Vegoda, member resources manager in ICANN’s Internet Assigned Number Authority. In recent years, ISPs have realized that they want to expand their business and attract more customers, but they have put off adopting the new version to avoid changing their networks for as long as possible, he said.

Vegoda said he expects to see significant IPv6 deployments among ISPs in the next couple of years. They don’t have to roll out the new system to all customers at the same time, he said: There are bridging technologies being developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force and others to allow customers to continue using their Internet addresses without change.

IPv6’s key selling point is that it’s bigger than the current version, said Vegoda. IPv4 networks can continue to operate when all the addresses have been allocated as long as they're maintained, he said. But without IPv6, ISPs won’t be able to expand their networks, he said.

But ICANN watchers said uptake of IPv6 is being hampered by other factors. The depletion argument can’t be ignored, but it has been diffused by conflicting calculations of the number of still-available IPv4 addresses and the fact that estimate dates for depletion have come and gone, said Jothan Frakes, chief operating officer of top-level domain services company Minds + Machines. “The weight of the message has faded,” he said, “but there will be a time when the boy cries wolf and the wolf is really there.”

Perhaps the biggest roadblock is the lack of attractive offers to entice users to demand IPv6 addresses, Frakes said. Many companies that provide IP addresses will likely need to upgrade or change their systems to offer IPv6 to consumers, but won’t do so without customer demand, he said.

If Google or some other major player rolled out a super- high definition service that could only be accessed by IPv6, it would lure people to adopt, Frakes said. It would be a bold move because most companies rely on business models that draw many visitors, which now happens only via IPv4, he said. Creating a service to draw customers is most likely to be the “tipping point” for IPv6, Frakes said. He predicted it will require grants to persuade businesses to operate only in IPv6 with exclusive and attractive content and resources.

IPv6 is not an incremental upgrade from IPv4, said Karl Auerbach, chief technology officer at InterWorking Labs and former ICANN board member. It’s as if an electric utility company announced “electricity version 2” that required customers to replace every outlet and appliance in their homes and offices, he said. There’s no improvement in service or apparent value that will drive customers to make the change, he said. Moreover, Auerbach said, the Internet is evolving into a “lumpy network” where uniform IP address space and direct end-to-end connectivity may become a thing of the past.

With some innovations, early movers benefit because they can charge higher prices, said Jeanette Hofmann, a researcher with the London School of Economics and the Social Science Research Center Berlin. But with IPv6, some early adopters will pay more than late movers because they have to invest in the development of the pieces needed for the new technology, she said. Some vendors believe they invested years too early in an IPv6 market “that turned out to be the wrong mechanism” for getting the technology adopted in time, she said.

“The problem with IPv6 is that “there are costs to adoption and no immediate benefits,” said Syracuse University School of Information Studies Professor Milton Mueller. He criticized Hofmann’s view of the failure to adopt IPv6 as a market failure, saying no mechanism other than the market is possible in this context. The issue, he said, is that the Internet technical community made a “disastrous and stupid mistake” by not defining a more limited change in the standard that simply extended the IPv4 space.