The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA www.iana.org) has allocated the last Internet Protocol (IP) address blocks from the global IPv4 central address pool, ending all debates over when this would happen, according to a statement received from the Ghana-India Kofi Annan ICT Centre of Excellence (AITI-KACE) on Monday.
It said several months remained before Regional Registries consumed all their remaining regional IPv4 address pools, with recent trends suggesting that Asia, Europe, and North America would exhaust in that order within a month or two on either side of July 1, 2011.
"The Internet has become the global communication network, now is the time to sustain its growth and stability by integrating IPv6. IPv6 adds great value to IPv4," stated Dr. Vint Cerf, Honorary Chairman, IPv6 Forum.
"The Internet is for everyone. IPv6 represents the next stage of the Internet's evolution and will help make this vision a reality," stated Lynn St. Amour, President and Chief Executive Officer of Internet Society.
The statement said the eventuality of this day was foreseen by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) almost 20 years ago, and a replacement was developed.
“In 1999 the IPv6 Forum was established by the IETF IPv6 Task Force with the mission to educate and promote the new protocol, and now that we have reached the end of the IPv4 free pool, that mission is more urgent than ever. The IPv4 based Internet will not stop working, but it will stop growing, while the IPv6 based Internet is designed to grow for generations to come,” it said.
“In our daily lives, failure of the Internet infrastructure or restrictions on its capabilities to add new users or support the worldwide economy are no longer acceptable.
“Therefore, the IPv6 Forum recommends to all people involved in ICT that now is the time to leverage 2011 and 2012 for planning and rolling out the new version of the Internet Protocol.”
The statement said enabling IPv6 in all ICT environments was not the end game but was now a critical requirement for continuity in all Internet business and services going forward.
"The IPv6 Lab at the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT (AITI-KACE) is set to support local capacity building and a smooth transition to IPv6.
“Luckily in Ghana, many major operators are already on track with respect to IPv6 implementation and are working to full IPv6 compliance," stated Dorothy Gordon, Director-General of AITI-KACE and President of IPv6 Forum, Ghana.