ReadWriteWeb

It's an IPv4 world today, but the days of IPv4 are numbered.

As of February 2011, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) had allocated all remaining public IP address ranges to the five global regional Internet registries. A quick look at this IPv4 Exhaustion Counter below shows a total of 13.24 /8 (8-bit) IPv4 address ranges remaining, for a total of less than 3,400 remaining unallocated IPv4 addresses. Essentially, this means
IPv4 is played out.

Earlier this spring, as anticipated, the last of the IPv4 address blocks was given to the regional Internet registries that dole them out to ISPs and other corporations. Unlike many predictions that go back dozens of years, we have run out of room. Yes, it will take several months before the world is completely run out of address space, and you might be able to find an unused Class C range here or there. But for the most part, you need to get cracking on a transition plan for your company to migrate towards IPv6 now.

IANA handed out the last of the IPv4 licenses earlier this week, as we reported. The analyst firm ZapThink compares the impending depletion of IPv4 addresses to Y2K. Y2K ultimately led to little more than a boom in ERP and colloidal silver sales, but as ZapThink points out there was a fundamental difference: "We're not nearly as worked up about IPv4 exhaustion as we were about Y2K ahead of the fact."

Had fewer companies done due-diligence to update systems for Y2K, could it have been more of a problem? That's controversial even today. Clearly, some people overreacted, but there were some problems as a result of Y2K. Could it have been worse? And are we paying enough attention to IPv6?

Turn on the "No Vacancy" sign. The Internet has run out of room.

At a ceremony this morning in Florida, the last block of IPv4 addresses were allocated to the Regional Internet Registries, whose job it is to further distribute these final addresses to others.

Today's announcement has been anticipated for quite some time, as the explosion of Internet-enabled devices and the growing number of Internet users has accelerated the demand for IP addresses.

Are you ready for IPv6? Did you know you'd better soon be ready? Is your ISP, or even country ready, and do they know why?

If you don't even know what IPv6 is, you are not alone. There are billions of people who don't know, and they shouldn't, since this fundamental protocol - IPv6 being the latest version of IP, invented in the 1970s by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn - is so deeply buried in the Internet services we use every day that when you are forced to see it, you know something is very, very wrong.

The Internet will run out of Internet addresses in about 1 year's time, we were told today by John Curran, President and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN). The same thing was also stated recently by Vint Cerf, Google's Chief Internet Evangelist.

The main reason for the concern? There's an explosion of data about to happen to the Web - thanks largely to sensor data, smart grids, RFID and other Internet of Things data. Other reasons include the increase in mobile devices connecting to the Internet and the annual growth in user-generated content on the Web.

Today's Internet was built largely on the IPv4 or Internet Protocol version four, first introduced in 1980. Now, three decades on and with mobile Internet tracing a shining arc across the virtual firmament, the Internet is running out of available IP addresses. So maintain the 130 delegates to the IPv6 Summit in Ireland, meeting today at Dublin Castle.

"Despite having nearly four and a half billion addresses, predications estimate that IPv4 will reach maximum capacity by September 2011," according to Irish IPv6 Task Force chair, Mícheál Ó Foghlú.