Amazon Fee for IPv4 Addresses Said Potential Driver of Move to IPv6
Amazon's decision to charge for public IP4 addresses on its cloud network could help spur businesses to move to IPv6, backers of the technology said. They have been pushing for years to persuade internet companies to move away from IP version 4 (see 1806070001). Now the cost-benefit analysis for IPv6 is shifting, leading to hope for a swifter transition.
Amazon's cloud service AWS will charge .005 cent per IP per hour for all public IPv4 addresses, starting Feb. 1, AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr blogged: "IP addresses are an increasingly scarce resource and the cost to acquire a single public IPv4 address has risen more than 300% over the past 5 years. This change reflects our own costs and is also intended to encourage you to be a bit more frugal with your use of public IPv4 addresses and to think about accelerating your adoption of IPv6 as a modernization and conservation measure."
IPv6 adoption has crossed the 50% mark globally, with Asia at the top, emailed IPv6 Forum President Latif Ladid. China now reaches 760 million IPv6 users, India 400 million, he said: Total penetration is 2.5 billion IPv6 users. The Internet Society (ISOC), which tracks IPv6 deployment via several different metrics, says 45% of the top 1,000 websites globally support IPv6.
"Levels of IPv6 deployment vary greatly," emailed ISOC Tech Program Manager Mat Ford. In some networks, such as mobile carriers in the U.S., close to 100% of internet traffic to major content sources runs on IPv6. Similarly, he said, using the same metric, the number of countries where the majority of traffic is IPv6 is growing.
Amazon's announcement "makes sense" because it doesn't have enough IPv4 addresses to start charging for them, Ladid said. Its main customers are enterprises -- companies that aren't really internet companies but "simple users who normally need to see a real business case to invest in upgrading their network to v6." Internet companies, on the other hand, were the first to adopt the technology because they saw the business case for it immediately.
Generally, cloud companies are the simplest way for businesses to adopt IPv6, Ladid said. That was made clear worldwide when Cloudflare managed to get most websites in Africa to use IPv6 without having to upgrade their web servers to it: "Cloud will be the first vehicle to offer IPv6 to the enterprise, especially to" small and mid-sized enterprises. Amazon's move will educate businesses on the value of moving to IPv6 as IPv4 network address translation (NAT) sunsets, he said.
IP addresses identify every device connected to the internet, noted the Computing Technology Industry Association. IPv4 uses 32-bit numbered IP addresses, allowing for 4 billion possible IP addresses. But now that many people have multiple connected devices, the number of devices far surpasses the number of available IP addresses. Many companies now use NAT to rout devices via one connection, allowing many private IP addresses to be consolidated into one public IP address.
Technologies that allow enterprises and network operators to share IPv4 addresses across multiple subscribers or internet endpoints extended the useful life of IPv4, Ford said. "However, those solutions are now reaching the limits of their usefulness as networks continue to grow and frequently create issues that result in additional expenses." The cost-benefit analysis of IPv6 is shifting, he said: "Increasing costs associated with the ongoing use of IPv4 will naturally play into business decisions, and we expect increased pressure for IPv6 deployment as a result."