Asia Pacific is the first region in the world to reach the point of being unable to meet demand for Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) addresses.
Rapid fixed and mobile network growth in the region driven by trends like bring your own device and cloud computing resulted in the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) reaching its last block of available IPv4 addresses on April 2011.
More than one year since, however, IPv6 deployment is still not moving fast enough although IPv6 allocation rates remain strong across the region. "We are finding a consistent growth trend across the Asia Pacific, but overall capability measured represents only a fraction of the total Internet," said Geoff Huston, APNIC chief scientist and head of APNIC Labs at the recent World IPv6 launch in Australia.
"[With the last block of IPv4 addresses allocated by APNIC], the obvious choice is to move to a bigger address space," said Azlan Osman, deputy director of Industry and Community Network Division at Malaysia's National Advanced IPv6 Centre (NAv6), which spearheads the country's transition to IPv6. "In theory, the IPv6 protocol allows each person [in the world] to have more than 5,000 IP addresses. However, there are still many legacy applications and equipment connected on IPv4. We can't just throw those out but we have to move forward to IPv6."
3 key challenges
For cloud service providers, operators, developers, and user organizations across the Asia Pacific, IPv6 deployment is now a critical business issue. The challenges they must first address include equipment that is not IPv6-ready, applications that do not support IPv6, limited IPv6 skills, lack of dedicated resources to implement IPv6 and budgetary constraints.