Don't panic: all IPv4 addresses are already exhausted

Y no more IPv4 addresses no more. It happened yesterday, February 3, when the last five blocks that IANA has distributed among the five regions of the world were assigned. The distribution has been proportional between ARIN (North America), LACNIC (Latin America and some Caribbean islands), RIPE NIC (Europe, Middle East and Central Asia), AfriNIC (African continent) and APNIC (East Asia and the region of the Peaceful). It is expected that the IPv4 addresses already assigned, in the hands of the various regional organizations that administer them, last until september. But from that moment there will be no more. Whoever needs a new Internet connection will receive one of the type IPv6.

The IP address space provided by IPv4 is 32 bit (4.294.967.296 IP addresses). IPv6 is a 128-bit address space, which, translated into the number of addresses, is an astronomical figure (340 sextillion IP addresses). When IPv4 was devised, 4.300 billion IP addresses seemed enough in the 70s, but this week they have been exhausted.

There are several reasons for this to have occurred. For one thing, only 14% of IP addresses are used effectively. Assignments have not been carried out optimally in the past, especially in the 80s, in those years the Internet was not extended beyond the scientific, university and government fields.

The fundamental problem is that IPv4 and IPv6 are incompatible. IPv4 addresses are made up of 4 groups of numbers whose highest value is 255 (example: 195.235.113.3) and those corresponding to IPv6 consist of eight groups of four hexadecimal digits that can be compressed if any group is “null”.

The effort of change will fall on Internet service providers, network operators and large portals. The home user should not notice anything, although in the medium term we may need to change the router. Fortunately, modern operating systems, and in particular those that equip mobile devices, support IPv6.

Sources: Engadget & ReadWriteWeb