Potential Impacts on Communications from IPv4 Exhaustion & IPv6 Transition

Citation
Robert Cannon, Potential Impacts on Communications from IPv4 Exhaustion & IPv6 Transition (FCC Staff Working Paper 3) (Dec. 2010) (full-text).

Overview
The Internet is in transition. The original address space, IPv4, is nearly exhausted; the Internet is in the progress of migrating to the new IPv6 address space.

The Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) developed in the late 1970s has the capacity for about 4 billion unique addresses. It would have been hard to imagine in the 1970s that 4 billion addresses were not going to be enough. But by the early 1990s, Internet engineers recognized that the supply of addresses was relatively limited compared to likely demand, and they set to work designing a successor to IPv4. They developed a new Internet Protocol, IPv6, with a vastly increased address space: 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses.

The short term solutions are necessary because there is not enough time to completely migrate the entire public Internet to "native IPv6" where end users can communicate entirely via IPv6. Network protocol transitions require significant work and investment, and with the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses looming, there is insufficient time to complete the full IPv6 transition.

But the short-term solutions are problematic. The "solution to the solution" is to complete the transition to a native IPv6 network. A native IPv6 network will restore end-to-end connectivity with a vastly expanded address space, will improve network performance, and should decrease costs. Completing the transition of the public Internet to IPv6 will take time.