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IPv4 addresses hitting critical stage - 5 percent remain

The final stages of the squeeze are arriving: of the 4.3 billion Internet addresses possible with today's Net mainstream technology, 95 percent are gone.
Written by Stephen Shankland, Contributor


ARIN, one of five registries that allocate Internet addresses, shows the steadily diminishing number of available "/8" blocks of 16.7 million IP addresses. In June, it was down to 16. Today, 12 remain.
(Credit: American Registry for Internet Numbers)

The final stages of the squeeze are arriving: of the 4.3 billion Internet addresses possible with today's Net mainstream technology, 95 percent are gone.

That's the word Monday from the Number Resource Organization, a group representing the world's five regional Internet registries (RIRs) that dole out the numeric addresses. "This is a major milestone in the life of the Internet and means that allocation of the last blocks of IPv4 to the RIRs is imminent," Axel Pawlik, chairman of the Number Resource Organization, said in a statement.

Text-based Internet addresses, such as http://news.cnet.com, are a convenient label for the numeric addresses that actually do the behind-the-scenes work when it comes to sending data such as a Web page across the Internet. Using today's IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4), though, the number of numeric addresses are dwindling. This is why Pawlik and many others are urging those with Internet operations to start supportin

For more on this story, read IPv4 Net addresses now 95 percent used up on CNET News.

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