The forthcoming depletion of IPv4 addresses hit the headlines again this week after the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which maintains IP address allotments, allocated another large block of addresses; bringing the D-Day for UK and world broadband ISPs one step closer.

IPv4 addresses are assigned to your computer each time you go online (e.g. 123.23.56.98). It is a unique online identifier made up of four number groups and allows you to communicate with other computers around the world; not unlike a phone number for voice calls. Sadly you can only have so many IPv4 addresses and as a result IPv6 was designed.

Presently IPv4, in use since 1984, provides roughly 4.5 billion addresses, of which less than 300 million (estimate) now remain available for new connections. By contrast IPv6 is plentiful and more secure by design. They are 128bits long, written in hexadecimal and separated by colons; for example:

2ffe:1800:3525:3:200:f8ff:fe21:67cf

Earlier this year the Number Resource Organization (NRO) reported that IPv4 addresses were now expected to be completely depleted before the end of 2011. The most recent predictions put the date in early September 2011, although it's extremely hard to give a precise prediction.

The news may get repeated several times each year but it is no less important and could result in serious problems for UK broadband ISPs that fail to adapt. However it's not just the ISPs fault, some routers still in use today also fail to offer "proper" IPv6 support, which could risk a costly problem for the future.

Some providers might even find themselves forced to start sharing individual IPv4 addresses between several users at the same time, while others may hit performance problems; latency in particular can suffer, which is bad news for online gamers where small differences equal big problems.

Consumer information site Thinkbroadband recently conducted research by calling 17 broadband providers to ask whether they supported IPv6. The results indicated significant confusion, with several providers incorrectly claiming to support it.


Frustratingly the study did not name any ISPs. However it's worth considering that your average front line support staffer isn't likely to know much about how the technical side of their ISP actually works; a few exceptions not withstanding ( AAISP , Timico and Zen Internet support staff are usually fairly competent etc. ). Just because they don't know what IPv6 is doesn't mean to say the ISP itself hasn't adopted to it.

There are also a few misconceptions about IPv4 exhaustion to address, such as fears that it will result in one gigantic internet crash. No, that will NOT happen. It is however possible that some consumers with older hardware and software combinations may face connectivity problems, though this may depend upon the ISPs "solution".