Ger­ard Best

Soft Land­ing.

That's the harm­less-sound­ing code name be­ing used in Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean for an op­er­a­tion set to take ef­fect as soon as the num­ber of un­al­lo­cat­ed In­ter­net Pro­to­col (IP) ad­dress­es falls be­neath two mil­lion.

IP ad­dress­es are foun­da­tion­al to the In­ter­net's ex­is­tence. The In­ter­net works be­cause every de­vice that goes on­line is as­signed a unique ad­dress, much in the same way that a per­son has a pass­port, a car has a li­cense plate, or a tele­phone has a num­ber. An IP ad­dress is a form of unique iden­ti­fi­ca­tion on the glob­al net­work.

The sys­tem by which those ad­dress­es are as­signed is In­ter­net Pro­to­col Ver­sion 4, or IPv4. The to­tal num­ber of avail­able ad­dress­es in IPv4 is ap­prox­i­mate­ly 4.3 bil­lion. But the pool of free ad­dress­es is now down to on­ly some 20 mil­lion.

When the de­ple­tion of IPv4 ad­dress­es trig­gers the Soft Land­ing, re­quests for the al­lo­ca­tion of IP ad­dress­es will be sub­ject to ad­di­tion­al re­stric­tions.

Not every­one who needs IPv4 ad­dress­es will be guar­an­teed to get them.

That de­ple­tion and in­evitable ex­haus­tion is the rea­son for the de­vel­op­ment and de­ploy­ment of IPv4's suc­ces­sor pro­to­col, IPv6.

LAC­NIC, one of the agen­cies that al­lo­cates and ad­min­is­ters IP ad­dress­es in the Caribbean, is us­ing the code name Soft Land­ing to de­scribe the up­com­ing crit­i­cal tran­si­tion from IPv4 to IPv6.

IPv4 de­plet­ed

"This is no sur­prise. As ear­ly as 1995, there were al­ready con­cerns about the IP ad­dress­es run­ning out, and en­gi­neers re­alised that some­thing need­ed to be done about it," said Car­los Mart�nez, LAC­NIC's chief tech­ni­cal of­fi­cer.

The cre­ation of LAC­NIC and oth­er reg­istries was one re­sult of the glob­al process of ad­min­is­ter­ing the In­ter­net's lim­it­ed pool of ad­dress­es that fol­lowed.

When Mart�nez and Ernesto Maj�, LAC­NIC's com­mu­ni­ca­tions and ex­ter­nal re­la­tions man­ag­er, spoke to the Sun­day Guardian last week, the pre­cise num­ber of avail­able IPv4 ad­dress­es in LAC­NIC's reg­istry, ac­cord­ing to the live track­er on their Web site, was 20,197,888, down about one-third from 31,487,488 in late Oc­to­ber 2013.

"Be­tween May to the be­gin­ning of Au­gust could be the ex­act date when those IP ad­dress­es run out," Mart�nez said.

He was pro­ject­ing the time­frame for the ex­haus­tion of the IP ad­dress­es based on a trend analy­sis of the rate of con­sump­tion.

"When IPv4 runs out, you even­tu­al­ly won't be able to con­nect new de­vices to the In­ter­net. It means that dur­ing the Soft Land­ing pe­ri­od, we won't be able to sat­is­fy all re­quests that peo­ple have," he said.

Ac­cel­er­at­ing IPv6 adop­tion

LAC­NIC's vis­it to T&T, from Feb­ru­ary 17 to 19 was part of the or­gan­i­sa­tion's push to ac­cel­er­ate IPv6 de­ploy­ment in the Caribbean.

"For In­ter­net users, (IPv6) is not a rad­i­cal change in terms of how the In­ter­net works. How­ev­er, for LAC­NIC and the oth­er reg­istries, IPv6 pro­vides a path to over­come the prob­lems as­so­ci­at­ed with the ex­haus­tion of IP ad­dress­es," Mart�nez said.

The to­tal num­ber of IP ad­dress­es avail­able un­der the new sys­tem is two to the 128th pow­er, he said. By one de­scrip­tion, that or­der of mag­ni­tude now makes an IP ad­dress avail­able for every grain of sand!

"More and more IPv6 ad­dress­es are be­ing de­ployed every day but it will take a while be­fore the whole In­ter­net runs on IPv6," Maj� said.

"In Trinidad and To­ba­go, there is an in­vest­ment that our mem­bers need to make in terms of up­grad­ing their in­fra­struc­ture equip­ment, chang­ing their sys­tems and most im­por­tant­ly train­ing their hu­man re­sources to be able to work with the changes in pol­i­cy."

IPv4 ex­haus­tion and IPv6 de­ploy­ment, Mart�nez said, will be "the over­ar­ch­ing is­sues" on the agen­da when LAC­NIC mem­bers gath­er in Mex­i­co from May 4 to 9 for LAC­NIC21, its an­nu­al gen­er­al as­sem­bly.

"There are two main is­sues. We want to make sure that every­one is on the same page re­gard­ing what is go­ing to hap­pen when the free pool falls be­neath the two mil­lion mark­er.

"The oth­er thing is to get our mem­bers to take the rec­om­mend­ed steps to en­sure that uni­ver­sal IPv6 de­ploy­ment is ac­cel­er­at­ed."

Maj� said there were some cul­tur­al and lin­guis­tic chal­lenges in­volved in con­duct­ing the sen­si­ti­sa­tion cam­paign in the Caribbean sub-re­gion.

Head­quar­tered in Mon­te­v­ideo, LAC­NIC in­cludes mem­bers main­ly from South and Cen­tral Amer­i­ca. Of its 3,300 mem­bers, on­ly 70 are from the Caribbean.

"We share the Caribbean with ARIN, the Amer­i­can Reg­istry for In­ter­net Num­bers, which is based in the Unit­ed States," Maj� ex­plained.

"Our Caribbean mem­bers are Haiti, Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic, Cu­ba, Trinidad and To­ba­go, the for­mer Nether­lands An­tilles and Guyana. They are re­al­ly small in terms of pop­u­la­tion and econ­o­my, as com­pared to, say, Brazil and Ar­genti­na.

"We are try­ing to work with the Caribbean Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Union, the Caribbean As­so­ci­a­tion of Na­tion­al Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Or­gan­i­sa­tions, CaribNOG and oth­er re­gion­al part­ners be­cause we do recog­nise the need for greater out­reach and com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

"We al­so have cre­at­ed a va­can­cy for an ex­ter­nal re­la­tions of­fi­cer for the Caribbean," Maj� said.

"We would def­i­nite­ly like to see more rep­re­sen­ta­tion from the Caribbean."