Ger­ard Best

In the Caribbean, we rou­tine­ly use our smart­phones, tablets, lap­tops and oth­er con­nect­ed de­vices for work, play and every­thing in-be­tween. Every de­vice con­nect­ed to the In­ter­net is iden­ti­fied by a unique ad­dress, and thanks to the swift growth of the In­ter­net, very lit­tle now re­mains of that fi­nite stock of num­ber­ing re­sources.

The cur­rent sys­tem of In­ter­net num­ber re­source man­age­ment, called In­ter­net Pro­to­col ver­sion 4 (IPv4), is near de­ple­tion. At a cer­e­mo­ny in Mi­a­mi in Feb­ru­ary 2011, the last batch­es of IPv4 ad­dress­es were dis­bursed to the five re­gion­al In­ter­net reg­istries that man­age those re­sources in the dif­fer­ent re­gions of the world.

Un­like Eu­rope and Asia who have run out, the Amer­i­c­as are now in the fi­nal phas­es of al­lo­cat­ing re­main­ing re­sources. Two reg­istries ser­vice the Caribbean–the Amer­i­can Reg­istry for In­ter­net Num­bers (ARIN) and the In­ter­net Ad­dress Reg­istry for Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean (LAC­NIC).

ARIN ex­pects that all re­main­ing IP ad­dress­es for North Amer­i­ca and the parts of the Caribbean they serve will be claimed be­fore the end of this year.

"In the com­ing weeks, for the first time in his­to­ry, an or­gan­i­sa­tion will come in and re­quest IPv4 ad­dress space and qual­i­fy, but we won't have it in our in­ven­to­ry to ful­fill the re­quest," said Richard Jim­mer­son, ARIN's chief in­for­ma­tion of­fi­cer re­cent­ly told Ars Tech­ni­ca.

IPv6 Tran­si­tion

But all is not lost. The In­ter­net is in the midst of a ma­jor tran­si­tion to a new ver­sion of IP ad­dress­es known as IPv6. And while IPv4 re­source al­lo­ca­tion has hit a crit­i­cal stage, there is plen­ty of IPv6 ad­dress space avail­able for any­one who wants to use it. The up­dat­ed ver­sion launched with 340 un­decil­lion ad­dress­es, more than enough to ad­dress­es the short­age.

The In­ter­net So­ci­ety has al­ready ob­served that more and more IPv6 net­works around the world are see­ing a lot of IPv6 traf­fic. Pop­u­lar web­sites like Google, Face­book, YouTube, Ya­hoo!, and Wikipedia have been us­ing IPv6 for quite some time now.

An Ap­ple ex­ec­u­tive an­nounced on the first day of its World Wide De­vel­op­ers Con­fer­ence (WWDC) that the App­Store would soon re­quire IPv6 sup­port for all iOS 9 apps.

"Be­cause IPv6 sup­port is so crit­i­cal to en­sur­ing your ap­pli­ca­tions work across the world for every cus­tomer, we are mak­ing it an App­Store sub­mis­sion re­quire­ment, start­ing with iOS 9," said Se­bastien Marineau, Ap­ple's vice pres­i­dent of Core OS.

Slow Caribbean de­ploy­ment

Still, Caribbean In­ter­net Ser­vice Providers have been slug­gish to adopt the new tech­nol­o­gy.

In a pair of ex­clu­sive in­ter­views with the Guardian last month, top of­fi­cials from ARIN and LAC­NIC dis­cussed Caribbean ISPs' slow rate of IPv6 de­ploy­ment.

Leslie No­bile, Se­nior Di­rec­tor of Glob­al Reg­istry Knowl­edge at ARIN, told the Guardian that about 43 per cent of ARIN's ISP mem­bers in the Caribbean had al­ready re­ceived their IPv6 al­lo­ca­tions. That fig­ure com­pares well with the per­cent­age of al­lo­ca­tions al­ready giv­en to ARIN's U.S. and Cana­di­an ISP mem­bers, about 47 per cent.

But LAC­NIC chief tech­nol­o­gy of­fi­cer Car­los Mar­tinez told the Guardian that, com­pared to their North Amer­i­can neigh­bours, Caribbean ISPs have been rel­a­tive­ly slow to ac­tu­al­ly de­ploy the new tech­nol­o­gy. LAC­NIC's fig­ures on In­ter­net traf­fic show a glob­al av­er­age IPv6 adop­tion rate of around five per cent, while the re­gion lags at less than one per cent, he said.

Or­gan­i­sa­tions such as Caribbean Net­work Op­er­a­tors Group, the Caribbean Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Union and Pack­et Clear­ing House have been rais­ing aware­ness of the need for re­gion­al or­gan­i­sa­tions and gov­ern­ments to tran­si­tion their net­works to IPv6.

"Any­one re­spon­si­ble for man­ag­ing an IP-based net­work should adopt IPv6 pri­or­i­ty as if the fu­ture of their net­works de­pend­ed on it, be­cause it does," said Bevil Wood­ing, in­ter­net strate­gist with Pack­et Clear­ing House. Wood­ing has been in­stru­men­tal in rais­ing the aware­ness of IPv4 ex­haust and the need for IPv6 tran­si­tion in the Caribbean.

"Se­cur­ing IP ad­dress­es sta­bil­i­ty is key to safe­guard­ing the bour­geon­ing Caribbean dig­i­tal econ­o­my. With IPv4 com­ing to an end and In­ter­net growth con­tin­u­ing to rise, there is no time like the present to make the shift to IPv6. It's sim­ply too im­por­tant an is­sue to leave un­ad­dressed."

ARIN on the road

The ur­gent need for IPv6 mi­gra­tion fea­tured high on the agen­da at a free ARIN on the Road event held in Roseau, Do­mini­ca on June 18. Two ses­sions led by Leslie No­bile will cov­er IPv4 de­ple­tion and IPv6 up­take in par­tic­u­lar. The one-day event brought par­tic­i­pants up to speed with the sta­tus and fore­cast of IPv6 adop­tion, and how to re­quest and man­age In­ter­net re­sources.

Tran­si­tion­ing to IPv6 is very pos­si­ble, and the ex­haus­tion of IPv4 ad­dress­es in the re­gion just pro­vides op­er­a­tors with one more re­minder that now is the time to make the tran­si­tion. One hopes that the ARIN event al­so helped to do ex­act­ly that.