It’s reality—the number of people and devices that connect to networks increases each and every day. That’s not a bad thing at all—we’re finding new and exciting ways to communicate to more people all the time, and that’s a good thing. In fact, it’s a basic human need. But the forecast isn’t exactly blue skies and sunshine because, as I alluded to in this chapter’s introduction, IPv4, upon which our ability to communicate is presently dependent, is going to run out of addresses for us to use.
IPv4 has only about 4.3 billion addresses available—in theory, and we know that we don’t even get to use all of those. There really are only about 250 million addresses that can be assigned to devices. Sure, the use of Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) and Network Address Translation (NAT) has helped to extend the inevitable dearth of addresses, but we will run out of them, and it’s going to happen within a few years. China is barely online, and we know there’s a huge population of people and corporations there that surely want to be.
There are a lot of reports that give us all kinds of numbers, but all you really need to think about to convince yourself that I’m not just being an alarmist is the fact that there are about 6.5 billion people in the world today, and it’s estimated that just over 10 percent of that population is connected to the Internet—wow!
That statistic is basically screaming at us the ugly truth that based on IPv4’s capacity, every person can’t even have a computer—let alone all the other devices we use with them. I have more than one computer, and it’s pretty likely you do too. And I’m not even including in the mix phones, laptops, game consoles, fax machines, routers, switches, and a mother lode of other devices we use every day!
So I think I’ve made it pretty clear that we’ve got to do something before we run out of addresses and lose the ability to connect with each other as we know it. And that “something” just happens to be implementing IPv6.
IPv4 has only about 4.3 billion addresses available—in theory, and we know that we don’t even get to use all of those. There really are only about 250 million addresses that can be assigned to devices. Sure, the use of Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) and Network Address Translation (NAT) has helped to extend the inevitable dearth of addresses, but we will run out of them, and it’s going to happen within a few years. China is barely online, and we know there’s a huge population of people and corporations there that surely want to be.
There are a lot of reports that give us all kinds of numbers, but all you really need to think about to convince yourself that I’m not just being an alarmist is the fact that there are about 6.5 billion people in the world today, and it’s estimated that just over 10 percent of that population is connected to the Internet—wow!
That statistic is basically screaming at us the ugly truth that based on IPv4’s capacity, every person can’t even have a computer—let alone all the other devices we use with them. I have more than one computer, and it’s pretty likely you do too. And I’m not even including in the mix phones, laptops, game consoles, fax machines, routers, switches, and a mother lode of other devices we use every day!
So I think I’ve made it pretty clear that we’ve got to do something before we run out of addresses and lose the ability to connect with each other as we know it. And that “something” just happens to be implementing IPv6.
DUDE! You STOLE MY chapters from my book and posted it here! You're a piece of shit! This is copied directly from my CCNA R/S Cisco Study Guide! Get this off your site now! EVERYTHING ON YOUR SITE IS STOLEN
ReplyDeleteYOU'RE A LOSER!