by Yves Poppe

We know that the Internet is running out of IPv4 addresses and that some in our community check twice a day Mat Ford’s doomsday clock or spend an hour once a week reading the tea leaves based on Geoff Huston‘s exhaustive data compiled at Potaroo. Like with global warming, there is still a school of thought out there arguing that this running out of IP addresses is just fear mongering and that we are not really running out of IPv4 addresses as a NATted world is more than adequate to run the Internet for the foreseeable future.

We know that the Internet is running out of AS (Autonomous System) numbers. Good thing that 32 bit AS’es were approved; interestingly without any fuss or major outcry. This topic obviously did not generate the same passion as IP addresses.

There is growing concern that the routing table size issue may become acute.

Some consultants even envisage a gridlocked internet running out of transmission capacity!

Last but not least while on the topic of exhaustion in our Internet: the alarming disappearance of available domain names containing IPv6!

So Yves goes searching for domain names containing the character strings of “ipv6” and finds domain names such as ‘IPv6migration.com’, ‘IPv6deployment.com’, IPv6address.com’ and ‘IPv6forum.com’ are all gone. However he finds that addresses containing “ipv4” are much easier to find, with ‘IPv4forever.com’, ‘IPv4forum.com’ and ‘IPv4address.com’ all gone.

So what does Yves suggest is the wisdom gained from this? Well, he suggests “With the highly speculative nature of the domain name business and its perceived value as trend indicator, it should be safe to bet that the bets are on IPv6!”