[Chapter-delegates] Leslie Daigle's interview to Forbes on Internet Space Shortage

[Sivasubramanian Muthusamy]

This is another article on one of the major concerns. Appeared in
http://www.forbes.com/technology/2008/03/14/internet-dod-ip-tech-inter-cx_ag_0314internet.html

The Internet often seems like a limitless landscape, connecting
billions of hyperactive endpoints, with more added by the minute. But
ask some of the engineers quietly working to keep those billions of
nodes seamlessly connected and they'll tell you the Internet is far
from infinite. In fact, it may be starting to get a bit crowded.

The problem, says Leslie Daigle, chief Internet technology officer for
the non-profit Internet Society, is simple math: the Internet Protocol
addresses that are assigned to differentiate networks and individual
computers at the edges of the Internet have 32 digits, allowing for
only a finite number of addresses--about 4.2 billion.

That may seem like plenty of space for the world's online population.
But huge swaths of IP addresses were originally allocated to the
groups that helped build the Internet, starting with the Department of
Defense and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and can't be
reassigned.

Add to that the quick proliferation of computers and
Internet-connected mobile devices, Daigle warns, and available slots
for new Internet connections will start to run out as early as 2010.
"There's not an immediate panic here, but the end is in sight," she
says. "Something has got to change."

The solution that about 1,400 engineers at this week's Internet
Engineering Task Force (IETF) conference are focused on is Internet
Protocol version six, or IPv6, an addressing system that would
increase the number of usable address by trillions of
trillions--easily enough to account for the Internet's growth for the
rest of human history.

Switching to IPv6, Daigle says, would also help solve another nagging
problem: spam. In today's addressing system, large groups of IP
addresses--what Daigle calls "the swamp"--are often assigned and then
left unused for a period of time. Spammers can impersonate those
virtual identities to circumvent e-mail filters based on blacklisted
IP addresses.

By starting a new accounting system from scratch, IPv6 could allow
more careful tracking of which IP addresses are assigned where,
limiting the IP identities that spammers can spoof, she says.

But changing the Internet's ordering system isn't as simple as it
sounds. In fact, replacing the last generation of IP addresses, IPv4,
requires reworking the entire infrastructure of the Internet--not just
revamping software but replacing much of the outdated networking
equipment installed in Internet service providers, large enterprises
and governments.

That kind of massive switchover, which would likely happen gradually,
is a great sales pitch for networking giants like Cisco (nasdaq: CSCO
- news - people ) and Juniper, whose newest hardware is capable of
handling both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.

But aside from the U.S. government and markets in Asia, where
mobile-device use is growing quickly and IPv4 addresses are scarcer
than in more mature markets in the West, Cisco director of operations
David West says customers aren't that interested. "They're watching
and waiting," he says.

Russ Housley, the general chair of the IETF, worries that's not
enough. "We've been warning about this for 13 years, so that when the
time came, we would be ready," he says. "But of course, everyone held
out. Only once IPv4 gets scarce will people get interested."

When service providers notice that addresses are running out, Housley
says they may trigger a "bank run" mentality, where businesses and
governments race to snap up all the remaining addresses.

There have been some virtual band-aids. Until now, businesses have
delayed the inevitable by using a workaround known as a network
address translator, or NAT. NATs can allow multiple computers to
connect to the Internet through a single IP address--but they also
complicate some applications by masking their virtual locations.
Voice, video, and peer-to-peer file sharing are all applications that
could become slower and more prone to bugs as the Internet becomes
increasingly "natted," says the Internet Society's Daigle.

That means the real problem with delaying a switch to IPv6 could be
that the tangled configuration of NATs will drag down the network's
performance, limiting what new applications can be created.

"The Internet is an organic environment, and it will continue to
function into the future," she says. "We just have to make sure the
future of the Internet is the one we want."

Gartner research analyst Lawrence Orans is more sanguine. He's heard
doomsday warnings for more than 10 years, he says, and year after
year, businesses have found solutions other than switching to IPv6. He
doubts that a shortage of IP addresses--even with the current
technology--will severely cripple the Internet.

Even so, the problem won't go away by itself, Orans concedes. He
compares the IP address problem to the so-called "Y2K" bug, the
millions of programming hours spent recoding software that wasn't
prepared for the switch to the "2" digit before Jan. 1, 2000.

"In fact, this is a bigger challenge than Y2K," he says, "But at least
with Y2K, there was a deadline."


-- 
Sivasubramanian Muthusamy
ISOC India Chennai