IPv6 is the Internet’s Future – and Together with ARIN We’ll Help You Enable IPv6

By Steven Wallace - Director, Internet2 Routing Integrity

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

While our community led early IPv6 development, the commercial sector has taken the lead.

As early founders of the internet, US research and education institutions hold a disproportionate share of IPv4 addresses, lessening incentives to embrace IPv6. While we’ve had enough IPv4 to meet our needs, the rest of the internet faced increasing IPv4 scarcity. The internet responded to the shortage of IP addresses by rapidly embracing IPv6. If you’re reading this article from your cell phone or home computer, odds are you’re using IPv6. Check to see if you’re using IPv6 here: https://test-ipv6.com.

As we run low on IPv4 addresses, we’re degrading the internet’s capability.

The internet’s most fundamental design feature is the concept that every device has a globally unique IP address, permitting any device to communicate directly with any other device. This feature is known as the end-to-end principle. As campuses run low on IPv4 addresses, they are forced to deploy technologies that share an IP address across multiple devices. The sharing of IP addresses degrades the end-to-end principle, limiting how devices can communicate. IPv6’s nearly unlimited number of addresses permits campuses to restore the end-to-end principle.

The deployment of IPv6 is a remedy.

Universal deployment of IPv6 is critical to the future of the internet. We’ve run out of IPv4 addresses, and the technologies used to make-do with too few addresses are harming the internet.

Register to join us on March 4 at 2 p.m. ET for a free, hands-on webinar organized by the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) specifically for the Internet2 community on the basics of IPv6 address planning and enabling hosted services. To learn more about IPv6, check out the Internet Society’s IPv6 pages: https://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/ipv6/