Hurricane Electric’s new iPhone app that shows a countdown to when all the IPv4 numbers will be depleted was recently featured in CIO Magazine. From the Article:
here are a limited number of addresses left for Internet Protocol, version 4, the system that has powered the Internet since before the Web. After they have all been handed out, service providers and enterprises will have to make their systems work with the next version, IPv6, or use workarounds.
IPv6 network backbone and collocation provider Hurricane Electric introduced on Tuesday an iPhone application that counts down the number of days until that moment of reckoning.
On a simple page, the application lists statistics such as the number of IPv4 addresses remaining and the number of domains already using IPv6. The counter for remaining IPv4 addresses goes down in real time, though it’s based on the calculated rate of depletion, not assignments of addresses in real time. (A second page shows Hurricane Electric facilities on a map.) At the bottom of the countdown page, in large type, is the number of days left until IPv4 addresses are exhausted. On Wednesday, it was 699.
Figuring out how long that depletion will take is no easy task, because the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) hands out IPv4 addresses on the basis of requests from RIRs (Regional Internet Registries), which in turn allocate them to the entities that use them. Those requests can’t be predicted. Several researchers have studied the problem, including Geoff Huston of Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) and Tony Hain of Cisco Systems. Their reports involve detailed mathematical analysis — and acknowledgments that the predictions are conditional and subject to change.
“That’s great, but for some people, to get the message across, you just need the bottom line,” said Martin Levy, director of IPv6 strategy at Hurricane. The company compiles information from those and other sources to come up with its own date prediction. Levy acknowledged it’s an inexact science.
“There’s no Y2K day. There’s no flag day,” Levy said. “It isn’t like on the first day of January 2010, we all have to swap.” The actual date could even come much earlier if the impending depletion causes demand to accelerate in a “land rush” for the last addresses, he added. But even though the 699-day prediction is nothing more than an educated guess of educated guesses, it matters, Levy said.
