Partner Article

What happens when internet space runs out?

Who would have ever thought that the day would come when the Internet would run out of space?

It would seem that this is exactly what is happening right now. But how? And why? And what can you do to make sure your business isn’t affected?

Dan Kitchen is the technical director of Razorblue, in Catterick, which specialises in managed IT services for a range of SMEs, business parks and public sector organisations and explains what this means for businesses.

Just like every house has an address, every device on the internet is allocated a unique Internet Protocol (IP) address.

Since the Internet’s inception- way back in the 1970s- an addressing scheme known as IP Version 4 (IPv4) was used to allocate addresses. It was thought that 4.3 million addresses available through this system would be enough for users around the world- but no one could have predicted the popularity of the Internet and how so many people have come to rely on it through PCs, smartphones and hand-held devices.

The rapid growth of the internet and popularity of the web have now exhausted this pool of addresses and the growth of the net is linked to the size of this pool- because everything that connects to the net needs an IP address to send and receive data.

Towards the end of last year, the last block of IPv4 addresses began to be allocated. Once these are depleted there will be no easy way for new devices to attach to the internet without complex translation and tunnelling methods- these could massively slow down the speed of the Internet which in itself could cause major problems.

How could it affect you?

The lack of IPv4 addresses will be a particularly significant problem for businesses that need to make services accessible to the outside world, such as servers within their corporate networks.

Help is at hand though as a new address system- IPv6- has been developed and has been available for several years.

However, the UK is desperately behind in adopting the newer version with only 0.19% of internet users able to access the IPv6 internet- compare this to countries such as France and Romania who are already at 5% and 9% respectively.

It’s vital that people start to enable IPv6 now in order to keep the internet open for business and to make sure they stay connected online as the number of web users and devices continue to grow.

Many ISP’s (internet service providers) are simply not acting to roll out IPv6 because they are not seeing demand from their end users and, therefore, no financial benefit. This demand will no doubt only be driven when people start to notice the effects, at which point it will be too late.

Our advice

If you aren’t talking to your ISP, IT support provider or in-house IT department about IPv6 yet, you should be. Many devices, such as PC’s running Windows XP are not compatible and will require replacement or software upgrades.

We’ve been working with providers and clients for some time now preparing for IPv6 and our network is fully IPv6 ready. We aim to have rolled out an IPv6 service to every one of our customers seamlessly by June.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Razorblue Ltd .