Will Development of IPv6 Technology Be The End of IPv4 Era

As the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to proliferate, more devices connect online daily. As there is a huge demand for IP addresses in the current market, the limited IPv4 resources simply cannot meet the needs of future network services.

The Usage of IPv6

The amount of IPv6 traffic on the Internet has been steadily growing, and future growth is expected to increasingly be in the IPv6 space as more addresses are assigned and infrastructure is enabled to use the new protocols. The development of IPv6 seems unstoppable and will eventually replace IPv4, becoming the new evolution of protocol in the future.

Can IPv6 replace IPv4?

At present, it seems that there are too many restrictions to completely replace IPv4, and it is even less advantageous than IPv4 in many aspects. IPv6 was not designed to be compatible with IPv4, thus this means that each IPv6 address needs an IPv4 address. Having to run both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses means that there are higher maintenance costs, which operators aren’t always willing to pay. Network address translation (NAT) has theability to make a collection of private IP addresses public. With a NAT machine, such as a firewall or router, thousands of privately addressed devices can be presented to the public using a single public IP address.

The majority of devices are only compatible with IPv4. Shifting to IPv6 compatible devices will take some investment and time. It’s hard to justify deploying or transforming to IPv6 while IPv4 is still more affordable, and reusable. Many public organizations like universities were provided a large set of free IPv4 address pools years ago and have built their network infrastructure to be IPv4 compatible. This allocation has been strained as students and faculty now have five or more devices requiring connectivity to university networks and resources. While the problem is, connected devices and applications are not all IPv6 compatible.

Plenty of network providers still choose to pay for some IPv4 blocks while they still can afford it. Buying the IPv4 address, however, is like shopping for clothes in a vintage market. When you slipped, you might get the blacklisted IPv4 block that was used by spammers. Getting out of anti-spam and blacklist can be difficult for some cases, so it's highly advised to pick only clean and spam-free IPv4 addresses. The idea of transferring the IPv4 address suggests that addresses shall be treated like property, where the address assignee has the right to choose which company to redistribute the addresses to. With this, it became possible to transfer idle IPv4 addresses of one company to another company, to help in solving the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses.

Conclusion

The deployment of IPv6 today is far from the end of the IPv4 era. IPv6 will coexist with IPv4. Under the current IoT trend, IPv6 will be used more in various fields, and IPv4 resources will become more and more scarce and precious. In this context, how to obtain flexible IP solutions in response to needs and trends is particularly important for the entire Internet industry. If you are ready to implement IPv6 into your business, LARUS is providing IPv6 training, kindly leave your contact below or live chat with our specialists at the right bottom.