IPV6 – Why we need it today!
The switch to IPV6 has been slow for many of us in the IT realm in the US. We have been talking about it as a looming threat but the efforts till date have been minimal. With the advent of LTE/WiMAX in the horizon the limits might be reached sooner than thought. When mobile devices will be assigned an IP address instead of just a PDP (packet data protocol) session as in the earlier wireless-G’s (2G/3G), the IPv4 addresses will run out very fast. But this doesn’t seem to bother the Wireless ISPs or the Telecom providers. It remains to be seen when the digital switch happens, and how it happens?
But till then for very obvious reasons, organizations and government agencies in the United States which use approximately 60 percent of the available IPv4 address space will remain dormant. The remaining 40 percent is shared by the rest of the world. Of the 6.4 billion people in the world, approximately 330 million live in North America, 807 million in Europe, and 3.6 billion in Asia. This means that the 5 percent of the world’s population living in the United States has 60 percent of the address space allocated. Of the 3.6 billion people living in Asia, approximately 364 million have Internet access, and the growth rate is exponential. This is one explanation of why the deployment of IPv6 in Asia is much more common than in Europe and the United States. Read more…
