The world has run out of IP addresses!

By : Administrator
Published 15th March 2011 |
Read latest comment - 14th June 2011

So it had to happen, the worlds pool of 4.3 billion Internet addresses has finally run out.

So that address you are using right now can no longer be taken for granted

But as any techie will tell you, this has been a long time coming, and just means a new standard will be coming out.

The current version IPv4 will be replaced with IPv6.

If you have a head for maths, apparently the new range will be a billion trillion times larger than IPv4 or to be more precise:
340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,770,000,000 and 1

http://www.icann.org/en/news/releases/release-03feb11-en.pdf

Steve Richardson
Gaffer of My Local Services
My Local Services | Me on LinkedIn
Comments
Thanks Steve, did you miss a zero!

Mark Pitts

No, but don't forget the one

Steve Richardson
Gaffer of My Local Services
My Local Services | Me on LinkedIn

Sorry, my mistake, lol

Mark Pitts

It's going to get messy!!

With little movement from a lot of ISPs on IPv6 there will be a whole new internet out there soon that many people won't be able to get to.

SysAdminMan

It's going to get messy!!

With little movement from a lot of ISPs on IPv6 there will be a whole new internet out there soon that many people won't be able to get to.

In laymens terms, can you explain it?

eg if I'm sat on my laptop on my IPv4 address of 86.140.0.0 will I be able to access IPv6 addresses, or will we all be phased over to IPv6?

Steve Richardson
Gaffer of My Local Services
My Local Services | Me on LinkedIn

That's right. If you just have an IPv4 address you will not be able to connect to an IPv6 address.

There will be a move towards 'dual stack' where you get an IPv4 and an IPv6 address. This needs to happen at the ISPs really so that customers will be able to connect to both types of addresses.

IPv4 blocks of address are starting to change hands for larger sums of money now and many providers will have a good supply yet.

There will also be some gateways between IPv4 and IPv6 so there may be some interesting solutions to help.

It's only delaying the inevitable though :-)

SysAdminMan

forum avatarVirtual Office
15th April 2011 3:02 PM
4.3 billion thats madness, soon we will al be a virtual reality of ourselves, living in a never ending cybersapce of facebook and tweets god help us.

..an update on BBC News Web giants promote new IPv6 internet address system

I never really thought we would ever get this far. It just goes to show though, that there are a lot of people in the world. It seems that with FB, twitter and the multitude of other social sites out there, the world is getting smaller and smaller.

Thanks,
Dreamraven

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