RIR and eNations
Information
In the early part of the 90's it was recognized that the adoption rate of networking and the address allocation methods of the time would result in an IP address shortage. It was this scenario that prompted the development of the next generation Internet protocol and thus IPv6 was born. However, as IPv6 was standardized, additional feature and benefits were incorporated into, or around, the protocol. Consequently, it soon became clear that the larger address space was just one of numerous benefits that IPv6 adoption will yield.
During this same period of time, additional address conservation methods were deployed - namely Network Address Translation (NAT) and Classless Interdomain Routing (CIDR), which substantially reduced the rate of IPv4 address consumption and forestalled the inevitable scarcity of IPv4 addresses. In the first half of this decade, the debate regarding IPv4 address scarcity, and the point at which IPv4 addresses would no longer be available to new consumers, has continued to rage on.
Meanwhile, adoption of the Internet has soared in countries across the globe who have traditionally not been large consumers of IP address space. Countries such as India and China, with their large populations and their impressive rate of computer technology adoption have added a variable to the address consumption rate debate not properly accounted for in previous estimates. Furthermore, the number of devices demanding IP connectivity is rabidly increasing as Internet appliances, consumer electronics, sensors, wireless communications devices, and other types of hardware devices surge onto the network.
In direct response to the position that the IPv4 address space will meet the world's IP address needs for decades to come, the body of work presented here, titled e-Nations, The Internet for All, uses data available from the Regional Internet Registries (RIR) and takes into account the growing adoption of the Internet and networking technologies on a global basis. The result is a strong and accurate argument for the adoption of IPv6 as the only viable way to sustain the growth of the Internet for all the world's inhabitants.
e-Nations Background Resources: