The Case for IPv6

February 22nd, 2010

IPv4 has served us well. It got the internet off the ground. It’s time to move on.

It’s a common joke made amongst network engineers that the internet was an experiment that escaped the lab before it was finished. The first time I heard that was from Paul Vixie during a talk at USENIX around 1995 or so. The most recent time I heard it was from Vint Cerf during a talk about IPv6. I find it funny because it’s kinda true. When the addressing scheme for IPv4 was decided, it was still an experiment in a lab, and the designers of the protocol figured they would have an opportunity to change the addressing at a future date. Then the internet became wildly popular and took off beyond anyone’s wildest imagination. We’re rapidly running out of available IP addresses.