The internet could face years of instability as it moves to a new addressing system, one of the network's original architects has warned.
Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the internet, spoke as the UK was urged to begin using the new addressing system. With current addresses due to run out in 2012, nations and businesses must get on with switching, said Mr Cerf. During the switch internet links could become unreliable, making sites and services hard to reach, Mr Cerf said.
"This has to happen or the internet will stop growing or will not be growable," he said of the move to the addressing system. The net has grown to its current size using version 4 of its addressing scheme (IPv4), which allows for about 4.3 billion addresses. Estimates suggest that this pool of addresses will be exhausted by the end of January 2012.
Priority issue
A system with a far larger pool of addresses has been created, called IPv6, but progress towards using it has been sluggish. The business community needs to understand that this is an infrastructure they are relying on and it needs to change for them to continue to grow and to rely on it," Mr Cerf said. He criticised global businesses, saying they were "short-sighted" for not making the shift sooner.
"They cannot grow their business if they do not have an address space to grow it into," he added.
more at the BBC Technology News
( Lauren Weinstein posted a clarification from Vint Cerf in his NNSquad mailing list. Apparently, the author of the BBC article has missed something. Vint Cerf would like to emphasize that he was suggesting that the IPv6 portions of the Net would have challenges, NOT the entire Net would be unstable. In particular he said
" ... introducing IPv6 involved getting a lot of software configured properly so there is a lot of work to be done, especially at the edges of the net. Users with mal-configured routers/ firewalls could have problems. The v6 environment will take time to stabilize but v4 will still be running." )
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