From the noughties period, acquiring enough IPv4 addresses for business sustenance and scalability has been difficult for companies. All of the around 4.5 billion Internet Protocol version 4 addresses are assigned. The major IPv4 exhaustion occurred when all regional internet registries ran out of their remaining pools of IPv4 addresses.
What Does IPv6 Mean?
The IETF developed IPv6 to address the IPv4 address depletion issue that had long been anticipated. In 1998, IPv6 turned into a Draft Internet Standard for it, and one of the internet standards almost 20 years later.
The word ‘IPv4’ refers to 32-Bit Internet Protocol addresses, whereas IPv6 addresses are 128-Bit resources. The other main difference between both is that IPv6 uses an alphanumeric addressing system, whereas IPv4 utilizes numeric addressing. Besides, the latter IP technology supports VLSM, unlike the former.
What Options Do You Have Today?
Notwithstanding the scarcity, IPv4 addresses are useable for most of the global internet, thanks to an IPv4 address ecosystem. The addresses are recycled and reutilized, so an association between regional internet registries and private companies was developed. Nowadays, big-name companies described as ‘industry giants’ hold a good part of the addresses. When SMBs struggle the most, every company is affected. This makes us wonder what the step to come is.
Because IPv4 is incompatible with IPv6, organizations use the IPv4 address scarcity and/or the required utilization of new IPv6 features as the basis for moving to IPv6. Using IPv6 necessitates full compatibility for all the existing internet protocols. There is a need for transitional pieces of technology, including dual-stack, Network Address Translation and tunneling solutions, for those protocols to operate together. Dual-stack IP technology enables using both IP types, as IPv4- and IPv6-based networks cannot intercommunicate.
In the past few decades, there has been an attempt to streamline IPv4 instead of transitioning to the other IP technology, and the effort shows. The NAT-based IP address mapping method was made to address the scarcity issue. However, the method has its downsides, most notably reducing the network performance speed and the deprivation of addressing as per the end-to-end principle.
How Sticking To IPv4 Can Benefit Businesses
It is not good to have idle IPv4 addresses in an exploitable state when these could bring more revenue to their holders and let SMBs scale their business operations. There exists a non-IPv6 solution to the address scarcity issue.
We can make an IP market that can be sustained as well as that allows the address holder to monetize their unutilized IPv4 resources with no concern regarding IP abuse with existing IPv4 assets. With the help of the market, businesses get to lease IP addresses without having to commit to high capital expenditures.
