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IPv4 addresses hitting critical stage - 5 percent remain

Stephen Shankland CNET News | October 18, 2010 7:49 AM PDT

Summary

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.

Topics

IPv4, Address, Internet, Networking


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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RE: IPv4 addresses hitting critical stage - 5 percent remain
tdhclueless50@... 19th Oct 2010
How to update to IPv6 would be a good place to start!
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tdhclueless50
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Take the extra IPs back.
themp 18th Oct 2010
Why not take back some of the IP addresses assigned to organizations like the DoD, HP, Xerox, Apple, Ford, etc? That would free up tens of millions of addresses possibly hundreds of millions of addresses. The DoD alone has 11 class A networks according to wikipedia.
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RE: IPv4 addresses hitting critical stage - 5 percent remain
luckyducky7@... 18th Oct 2010
@themp Because that actually makes sense to do. Of course, they'll only do this after 200.4 million IPs left are used- so it'll take a little while still: that should still enough time to make a next-er generation system that's 1.) actually understandable enough to use and 2.) backwards-compatible with most IPv4 devices out there still.

Otherwise, when all of these 200.4+ million IP addresses run out, the sky will certainly fall in, because nobody knows how to manage/cares about IPv6.
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RE: IPv4 addresses hitting critical stage - 5 percent remain
nickdangerthirdi@... 19th Oct 2010
@luckyducky7@... actually there are people who care/manage IPv6, and eventually it will become the standard, and its really not that difficult to understand if you actually read about it instead of what someone else thinks about it because they are incapable of understanding it.
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RE: IPv4 addresses hitting critical stage - 5 percent remain
ejhonda 18th Oct 2010
We've already begun converting many of our internal IP subnets to private IPs because we figure someone is going to come knocking and asking for the crazy number of class C addresses we own.
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Classic tragedy of the commons
stevenmcnutt Updated - 18th Oct 2010
Turning IPv4 addresses into private property rather than incompetently doled address blocks. Apple has a whole class 'A', and Ford?!? Give me a break.
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RE: IPv4 addresses hitting critical stage - 5 percent remain
General Chat 18th Oct 2010
@stevenmcnutt I have had a Class C for 15 years now. It's still assigned to me even though I don't use it. Would be nice to throw it up like some domain names are. And yes it's a personal assignment. I am currently retired.
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RE: IPv4 addresses hitting critical stage - 5 percent remain
Lerianis10 18th Oct 2010
IPv4 address are only hitting the 'critical stage' because we are not seizing and shutting down all of those 'parking' websites.
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Recycle
georgegolding 19th Oct 2010
There are millions of useless websites, wasting IP's. All we need to is recycle half of them and we're ok for the next decade. Lets not do the normal human thing and upgrade the whole dam thing causing huge problems, only to makes space to fill it with more junk! Lets just clean up the mess instead.
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RE: IPv4 addresses hitting critical stage - 5 percent remain
tdhclueless50@... 19th Oct 2010
How to update to IPv6 would be a good place to start!
Thanks
tdhclueless50

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