The pool of Internet addresses has officially been drained. Four non-profit Internet administrative groups: the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the Number Resources Organization (NRO), the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) and the Internet Society said at a press conference in Miami, Florida, on Wednesday that the supply of IPv4 addresses has been depleted.
“This is a major turning point in the ongoing development of the Internet,” said Rod Beckstrom, ICANN's president and CEO, in a statement.
It isn't quite as bad as it sounds, there are likely to be addresses to be had for months if not years, and the dwindling supply may be extended through network addressing tricks.
The last remaining IPv4 addresses (about 33 million) were assigned to the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) for the Asia Pacific region earlier this week and the five final blocks were also rolled out in conjunction with the press conference.
The hope is that Internet service and network providers may finally be motivated to deploy equipment that supports IPv6 (IPv4’s successor.)
For those IP Noobs out there, IPv4 addresses take the form of four sets of numbers ranging from 0 to 255 separated by full-stops. They can describe about 4.3 billion addresses which generally then get associated with an Internet domain name through the DNS system.IPv6 addresses are expressed using eight sets of four-digit hexidecimal numbers and can represent enough web addresses that it’s difficult to foresee IPv6 address exhaustion ever being a problem.
At the moment though, Google say only about 0.2% of of its visitors would be capable of accessing an IPv6 version of Google search if the company offered such it.
However, we are moving foward, albeit slowly. On June 8, 2011, the Internet Society will be staging an event called World IPv6 Day where, Akamai, Cisco, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Limelight Networks, Juniper Networks, Yahoo, and a handful of other organizations will be enabling IPv6 on their networks as a 24-hour test.
But until then, PANIC!
The internet's ran out.
Source: Informationweek