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A couple of weeks ago I partook in a town referendum.
At issue was a parcel of land literally behind my
house that developers have been itching to develop.
Most of the town residents, including myself, are
against such development and I wanted my voice heard.
However, there was one problem: I had no idea how to
use the archaic mechanical voting device. Once the
curtains were drawn, I stood in front of this machine,
totally dumbfounded. Finally my wife, hearing my cries
for help, came to my rescue and showed me how to use
the contraption.
In the age of the Internet, GHz microchips, and
space tourism why would we need such complex
mechanical devices to register one's vote? I just
imagined what people had to go through to cast their
votes. To my surprise (and embarrassment) nobody else
seemed to have a problem with this task. I probed the
attendant about voting through the Internet. She
looked at me with a puzzled expression and asked: "Why?"
The lesson for that day: People are comfortable with
what they are accustomed to, and will use it as long
as it gets the job done.
An example of this concept in the Internet world is
slowly coming upon us and many are still unaware of
the repercussions. It is the impending IPv4 to IPv6
switch-over that's looming in the background. It may
arrive sooner than we think. IPv4 is the version of IP
(as in TCP/IP) that the entire world uses to connect
to the Internet. It has been in use since 1981 and has
proved its stability and expandability time and again
in the face of exponential growth of connected nodes
and the servers.
An IPv4 address comprises 32 bits consisting of
four 8-bit segments known as octets. Theoretically
such configuration can support up to 4,294,967,296
addresses. While such a large address space seemed
unlimited back in the early days of the Internet, by
1992 it had become apparent that given the pace of
growth in online nodes, IPv4 needed a replacement. It
has been estimated that by 2010 the current IPv4
system will be exhausted. IPng (Next Generation) was
born as a result of this necessity. It has since come
to be known as IPv6. With a 128-bit address
specification, IPv6 can support
340,282,266,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,465
addresses. Just to show how astronomical this number
is, every square inch of the earth's surface area can
be assigned 430,381,032,076,568,144,027 different
addresses.
You would think that with only a few years left in
IPv4's life, people would be scrambling to migrate to
IPv6. Not so, and it all goes back to that voting
machine mentality I referred to at the beginning of
this article. We have become too accustomed to the
current IP system. Many network managers and
programmers (myself included) continue to work and
program with the existing system and see no need to
bother with IPv6. In fact, innovations such as
subnets, CIDR (classless interdomain routing), and NAT
(network address translation) have been introduced
over the years to combat the IPv4 address shortage by
assigning smaller address blocks to users and reducing
the routing table sizes in the routers. Nearly all of
the networking applications and protocols used on the
Internet are IPv4-based and network programmers
continue to use IPv4-based APIs to write their
applications.
IPv6 certainly has a considerable advantage over
IPv4. The gigantic address space aside, it comes with
a slew of other benefits such as enhanced security,
improved QoS, and a very efficient routing scheme,
among many others. It is certainly a boon to Internet
telephony. But switching over to IPv6 is not going to
be like applying a service pack to your server. I am
envisioning countless months of pain and suffering
before companies can begin to integrate IPv6 into
their applications and networks. The reluctance to
move is so great that Microsoft has so far shown
little initiative to push its users towards IPv6.
Other software and operating system vendors have just
begun to bundle some IPv6 functionality with their
products.
A move to IPv6 is a no-brainer when considering
that today less than eight percent of the world's
population is online and millions of people are just
waiting to go online in the near future. But I, for
one, am quite content with IPv4 and not looking
forward to the day that I have to update the
applications, install new server software, and buy new
hubs and routers. If we thought Y2K was bad, here
comes IPv6 to give it a run for its money.
Are you concerned with the impending IPv6 migration
avalanche? Use your IPv4 SMTP server to send me an
e-mail while you still can.
Robert Vahid Hashemian provides us with a healthy dose of reality
each month in his Reality Check column. Robert currently holds the
position of director for TMCnet.com -- your online resource for CTI,
Internet telephony, and call center solutions. He can be reached at rhashemian@tmcnet.com.
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