From the Internet Society of Australia (ISOC-AU), comes this important message:
'ISOC-AU has been requested to help publicise the following
announcement from the Number Resource Organisation, that the Internet
has reached the point where less than 10% of IPv4 remain unallocated.
Please circulate this announcement as widely as possible.'
'ISOC-AU has taken a leading role nationally and
internationally in raising awareness of IPv6 and supporting discussion
since we established the ISOC-AU IPv6 Special Interest Group in 2005.
Since then, it has pursued the following major activities to help
build understanding of IPv6:
- annual Australian IPv6 Summits - http://www.ipv6.org.au/summit/
- IPv6 for e-Business - http://www.ipv6.org.au
- supporting development of the Australian Government IPv6 transition strategy which will provide for full implementation of IPv6 on Australian Government services by 2012
- participation in the international IPv6 Forum and global IPv6 Summits and events representing Australia
- membership of the Asia Pacific IPv6 Task Force representing Australia
- regular updates to the National ICT Industry Alliance on IPv6 - see http://nictia.org.au'
So.... what to do about it. There is quite a bit of information on the Web about IPV4 and IPV6.
TCP-IP is the commincations protocol that the Internet uses - you may have occasionally seen numbers like
http://66.102.11.99 appear in your browser instead of domain names (
www.google.com). IPV4 is the addressing system in place at the moment and what the
Number Resource Organisation is telling us is that only 10% of those addresses are left available.
What is potentially problematic is determining exactly when they will run out.
Geoff Huston has developed an interesting model for predicting when we will run out and you can see the updates on that prediction
here. So, at the time of this post, it appears to be somewhere between 8th September 2011 and 31st August 2012. This isn't an exact science though and there are many factors that could impact this.
Governments and other important Internet related organisations around the world have been working on this problem for a long time and are looking at implementing a new addressing scheme (IPV6) which greatly expands the number of available addresses. What we need to do now is start monitoring these developments and planning migrations to the new environment. Most likely your technology providers will know about this and have strategies or plans in place. You might like to check with them at some point though.