From time to time, you may have seen the newspapers (or their online counterparts) drag out a story about IP addresses running out accompanied by some sort of estimate as to when they will run out. It’s a cheap story to run and any non-technical journalist can get away with some basic coverage. Doing a search on Google yielded the following estimates:
- 30/10/2007
- Estimated year of exhaustion: 2010
- Estimation by Vint Cerf
- 25/08/2008:
- Estimated year of exhaustion: 2010
- Estimation by Vint Cerf
- 30/05/2010:
- Estimated year of exhaustion: 2012
- Estimation by Daniel Karrenberg
- 13/08/2009:
- Estimated year of exhaustion: Late 2011 / Early 2012
- Estimation by OECD
- 23/07/2010
- Estimated year of exhaustion: 2011
- Estimation by Vint Cerf & John Curran
It seems that in the next few years, there won’t be any IP addresses left in the IPv4 address space to assign to network operators. This in turn means that network operators will be limited in how much they can expand their networks without having to employ the use of technologies like NAT (Network Address Translation).
So why are we running out of IP addresses?
Back when IPv4 was originally designed a few decades ago, it was designed with a 32-bit address space. In mathematical terms, this is 2^32 addresses or a potential 4.294 billion addresses (ignoring things like broadcast addresses). With nearly 6.7 billion people on the planet, that’s less than one IP address per person. Of course, not everyone will have access to the Internet but there are many that do have access and have multiple devices. Personally, I have three such devices being my iPhone, iPad and my broadband connection at home.
The inevitable fact is that IPv4 address will run out. As to when is anyone’s guess.
So what is the solution?
IPv6 (which provides a raft of improvements over IPv4 including network configurations, broadcast, multicast and Quality of Service) but it’s most relevant benefit is that it has an address space of 2^128 IP addresses, or in real terms 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 IP addresses.
That’s a lot of addresses and more addresses per person than, well, anything!
Unfortunately, with many things, we have to reach the brink of an issue becoming a reality before change is enacted. ISPs don’t have an incentive to offer IPv6 as it offers little commercial benefit to them. Meanwhile, network hardware manufacturers at the consumer level continue to churn out the same old stuff with minimal innovation and future proofing.
Let’s hope everyone gets on board sooner rather than later. This might not be like a Y2K sort of deal but is still something that needs to be seriously acted upon.
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