Why Do We Need IPv6?
Well, the short answer is, we need to communicate, and our current system isn’t really cutting
it anymore—kind of like how the Pony Express can’t compete with airmail. Just look at how
much time and effort we’ve invested in coming up with slick new ways to conserve bandwidth
and IP addresses. We’ve even come up with variable-length subnet masks (VLSMs) in our
struggle to overcome the worsening address drought.
It’s reality—the amount of people and devices that connect to networks increases every day.
That’s not a bad thing at all—we’re finding new and exciting ways to communicate to more
people all the time, and that’s a good thing. In fact, it’s a basic human need. But the forecast
isn’t exactly blue skies and sunshine because IPv4, upon which our ability to communicate is
currently dependent, is going to run out of addresses for us to use. IPv4 has only about 4.3 billion
addresses available—that’s in theory, and we know that we don’t even get to use all of
those. There really are only about 250 million addresses that can be assigned to devices. Sure,
Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) and Network Address Translation (NAT) have helped
to extend the inevitable dearth of addresses, but we will run out of them, and it’s going to
happen within a few years. China is barely online, and we know there’s a huge population of
people and corporations there that surely want to be. Many reports give us all kinds of
numbers, but all you really need to think about to convince yourself that I’m not just being an
alarmist is the fact that there are about 6.5 billion people in the world today, and it’s estimated
that just more than 10 percent of that population is connected to the Internet—wow!
That statistic is basically screaming at us the ugly truth that, based on IPv4’s capacity, every
person can’t even have a computer—let alone all the other devices we use with them. I have
more than one computer, and it’s pretty likely you do too. And I’m not even including in the
mix phones, laptops, game consoles, fax machines, routers, switches, and a mother lode of
other devices we use every day! So I think I’ve made it pretty clear that we have to do something
before we run out of addresses and lose the ability to connect with each other as we
know it. And that “something” just happens to be implementing IPv6.