IPv6 doomsday won't hit in 2012, experts say

As old addresses disappear, most enterprises can spend the year preparing for the new protocol

December 29, 2011, 6:07 AM ? Next year will see one more regional Internet registry run out of IPv4 addresses, but 2012 will be more of a year to prepare for the inevitable shift to IPv6 than an Internet doomsday, according to networking experts.

By midyear, Europe's RIPE NCC (R?seaux IP Europ?ens Network Coordination Centre) is expected to allocate the last of its addresses under the version of Internet Protocol used by most consumers and enterprises now. That event will follow the depletion in April of addresses controlled by APNIC (Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre), the first of the five regional registries to run out of addresses for enterprises and service providers.

When it comes to Internet addressing, the year now winding to a close may prove to have been the most significant for decades. On Feb. 3, the Internet Assigned Names and Numbers Authority (IANA) got out of the business of assigning blocks of IPv4 addresses, 30 years after that protocol debuted. As planned, IANA handed out one of its remaining five blocks of addresses -- each about 16 million addresses -- to each of the five regional registries, which serve Asia-Pacific, Europe, North America, Latin America and Africa.

Though the clock is ticking on the remaining availability of new IPv4 addresses, people working on this transition assure users that they aren't likely to be cut off from either websites or Web viewers for quite some time. Transitional techniques to make the two systems coexist won't seriously degrade Internet performance for a while, some said. What this gives enterprises is time to prepare.
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