It’s the end of an era, even if it isn’t exactly the end of the Internet. North America has now officially exhausted the number of available IPv4 Internet IP addresses, according to the organization responsible for managing the addresses. The news affects companies in the U.S., Canada, and in some Caribbean countries.
The American Registry of Internet Numbers (ARIN) said yesterday that it has issued the last IP addresses in its free pool. ARIN is the non-profit organization in charge of overseeing Internet number resources such as routing registries, registration transaction numbers, and domain name servers.
Organizations can still request IPv4 addresses, however. ARIN said it will continue to process and approve requests for address blocks, which may then be fulfilled via a wait list or by its transfer market that allows companies to release IP addresses they no longer need. Entities will also now be able to make unlimited numbers of transfer requests for the first time, as a result of the end of the existing IP addresses.
A Very Long Waiting List
For organizations on the wait list, receiving an IPv4 address will be contingent on ARIN receiving new addresses from the Internet Assigned Numbers Registry (IANA), a unit of ICANN, the corporation responsible for overseeing the global allocation of IP addresses. Members of the wait list can also receive addresses from organizations that return their IP addresses or whose IP addresses are revoked.
“If we are able to fully satisfy all of the requests on the waiting list, any remaining IPv4 addresses would be placed into the ARIN free pool of IPv4 addresses to satisfy future requests,” said John Curran, president and CEO of ARIN, in a statement. However, the organization isn’t expecting to see a large influx of unused IPv4 addresses.
Getting into IPv6
The adoption of IP addresses has accelerated in recent years, thanks to the sudden explosion of devices such as smartphones, tablets, e-readers, and smart watches. Anything that connects to the Internet (including almost everything with the word “smart” in its title) needs its own IP address, that set of numbers that uniquely identify devices and Web sites. Although there are around 43 billion IPv4 addresses, that isn’t nearly enough to cover every device in the world.
That doesn’t mean that the Internet has run out of addresses altogether, although it does mean companies will have to switch to IPv6 addresses in the future. IPv6 is a newer version of the Internet Protocol used by devices to communicate with each other over the network, and has an almost inexhaustible number of addresses to allocate.
Companies have been gradually shifting to IPv6 addresses over the past several years, and the trend has accelerated recently. One of the advantages of the new protocol is that it is much faster than the previous version. However, adoption of the IPv6 protocol remains slow, with only about 13 percent of servers supporting it. Since both a client and a server machine need to support IPv6 to be able to use the new protocol, the lack of server support remains a major issue.
