The Grill: John Curran

The guardian of North America's Internet addresses explains why he thinks companies ought to start IPv6 upgrades now.

As president of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), one of several regional Internet registries, John Curran oversees the issuance of Internet addresses for most of North America. The problem: IP Version 4 Internet addresses are going, going, gone. And users who get new IPv6 addresses could have a lousy experience when visiting Web sites that haven't been updated for IPv6 -- and they may not even know why. Curran explains when the world will run out of IPv4 addresses and what it takes to upgrade to IPv6.

Why are we running out of Internet addresses? We created IPv4, a 32-bit IP address architecture, more than 30 years ago. IPv4 gives a total of about 4 billion possible addresses. That seemed like a lot, but when you think about it now, with the number of people on the planet, the pervasive nature of the Internet and the number of devices each one of us has, 4 billion is a fairly small number.

Dossier

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As president of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), one of several regional Internet registries, John Curran oversees the issuance of Internet addresses for most of North America. The problem: IP Version 4 Internet addresses are going, going, gone. And users who get new IPv6 addresses could have a lousy experience when visiting Web sites that haven't been updated for IPv6 -- and they may not even know why. Curran explains when the world will run out of IPv4 addresses and what it takes to upgrade to IPv6.

Why are we running out of Internet addresses? We created IPv4, a 32-bit IP address architecture, more than 30 years ago. IPv4 gives a total of about 4 billion possible addresses. That seemed like a lot, but when you think about it now, with the number of people on the planet, the pervasive nature of the Internet and the number of devices each one of us has, 4 billion is a fairly small number.

Dossier

Name: John Curran

Title: President and CEO

Organization: American Registry for Internet Numbers

Location: Chantilly, Va.

Favorite technology: "The Internet-based protocols, including IP and the Web-based protocols. I am a huge fan."

Something people don't know about him: "I have been chief technology officer at three companies, and a CIO."

Favorite pastime: "My 40-foot sailboat."

If he weren't CEO of ARIN, he'd probably be: "A park ranger."

Recent good read: "National Suicide: How Washington Is Destroying the American Dream from A to Z, by Martin L. Gross. It's a very thought-provoking book."

In the early '90s we realized that at the rate the Internet was going, we were going to run out of address space, and [so we] came up with a new protocol, IPv6. We standardized that in the mid-'90s. The heavy work of designing the protocols has been done.

How long will it be before the inventory of remaining IPv4 addresses is depleted? Based on how quickly we are drawing numbers out of the pool, we estimate that we have about 560 days left.

Then what? People have compared this to a Y2K event, but this big event will happen much more incrementally. You'll see the largest carriers run out of IPv4 addresses and start connecting customers with IPv6. This will happen in the background.

It's much more of a creeping change, and it's easy to ignore. It will be very subtle when it occurs, and companies will be caught off guard.

How many Web sites have enabled IPv6 so far? Right now, between 3% and 4% of Web sites out there have IPv6 turned on. That's not where we should be, because we're getting up now to the point of transition. It's a scant two years away.

Is anyone paying attention to this issue? Yes. The network providers, the national backbones. They need access to new addresses to add new customers. Effectively, the Internet becomes full. So they have to learn to connect customers up with IPv6, they have to run IPv4 and IPv6 in parallel, and they have to learn how to put gateways in that map IPv6 customers back to IPv4 Web sites, to the old Internet.