Today APNIC announced it had officially depleted its general reserves for IPv4 space, leaving only a single /8 remaining in its reserves.

http://www.apnic.net/community/ipv4-exhaustion/graphical-information

What does this mean?

This basically means that APNIC (Asia and Pacific region) will no longer be issuing out IPv4 space as it used to, it will now only issue a maximum of a /22 (1024 IPs) to companies.  Content providers and eye ball networks alike will now be forced to deploy IPv6 as their IPv4 reserves deplete.  Companies were only allowed to request a maximum of 1 year in advance for IP address allocations previous to this event, so most companies will only have a maximum 1 year supply of IPv4 space remaining.

Over the following months to year it is likely we will see companies deplete their remaining IPv4 space, and only be able offer IPv6  support to their customers (whether an ISP or a hosting/content provider).

While other RIRs (Regional Internet Registry) such as ARIN may have IPv4 space left, this will not last for very long.

What has Crucial done?

We have been planning for this event for the past 2 years, and have done a number of things in preparation.  First and foremost we have IPv6 allocations, and support IPv6 across our entire network on both our Australian and US networks.  This includes transit providers, all the way through to supporting IPv6 in all levels of our network using Dual Stack technology (no tunnels). Secondly we have recently received our final IPv4 allocation from APNIC which should last us for the next 12 months.

We are working to support IPv6 across all our products, and have been pushing our vendors (such as cPanel) to support IPv6 sometime.  We should have IPv6 support across our VPS/Cloud range within a few weeks providing all customers with a /64 allocation, and as soon as cPanel releases IPv6 support we will be implementing support for this across our plans.

How will this effect you?

This may effect you in a number of ways, if you are an end user you its likely at some point you will need to buy hardware that supports IPv6, such as a router which supports IPv6.  You may also need to upgrade your computers to either a completely new computer, or an operating system (such as Windows 7) that supports IPv6. Failure to do this, may result in you not being able to view some sites on the internet that are running on IPv6 – at first this may be a minor inconvenience, however over time more and more content is likely to be unavailable.

If you are a business and have a website, or public facing services on the internet then you will require a bit more work. Firstly you will have to upgrade your corporate network so as to ensure your employees will be able to access content on IPv6 – this will require similar steps to above but on a larger scale.  The next step will require you to ensure your public internet facing services support IPv6, which may require a range of updates depending on the setup.  For some applications, code may need to be changed to support IPv6.

For some companies or individuals this may be easy to do, for others there may be a fair amount of work – especially if applications need to be re-written to support IPv6.

What is IPv6?

All computers (and internet connected devices) require an address (think of it as a phone number) to communicate with each other, this is what IPv4 and IPv6 provide. IPv4 was originally designed in the 1980s to allow computers and larger networks to communicate with each other.  IPv4 supports a maximum of 4.3 billion addresses and at the time was thought to never run out, or not run out for the foreseeable future.  Nobody originally expected the internet to grow to where it is today and a result we have now almost run out of IPv4 IPs.

This is when IPv6 was born, using a 128 bit addressing system it supports a huge number of IPs (2 to the power of 128) which is 340,282,366,920,938,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 IPs.  With this many IPs and the current growth rate of IPs used, there is no foreseeable limit.

Note: A /8 is approximately 16.8 million IPs.