Internet Getting Ready To Switch To IPv6 Address System

The current Internet address system IPv4 will be expiring immediately, by the middle of this year. The total capacity of the present system is about 4.3 billion addresses, divided into 256/8 blocks. The last 2 blocks of the present system was allocated to Asia Pacific Network Information Centre on 3^rd February, 2011 in Florida. Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is responsible for allocating address blocks to Regional Internet Registries (RIRs), who will distribute the final addresses to the needy in their region.

When the present system was designed in 1980s, it was thought that the addresses will last for ever. But the heavy growth in the use of internet, both in developed and developing countries, has contributed to the fast depletion of the IPv4 address system. Wide spread use of mobile devices to access internet is another reason. Class A address blocks that can hold 16 million addresses were allotted to universities and large organizations, because the next smaller allocation unit, Class B could hold only 65536 addresses, and was inadequate for their requirements.

IPv6 address System

IPv6 address system is the only viable solution to the shortage of addresses. This system has a 128-bit address format compared to 32-bit format of IPv4. IPv6 can have 3.4x10^38 addresses. That would be a whopping: 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses for about 6.5 billion people populating this world.