Fossil fuels and IPV4 addresses have one thing in common: They are only limited amounts available:
When in the early days engineers developed the first IP addresses, they never thought they’d need more than 4.3 billion of them. Remember, initially the internet was mostly a network for academic use, but now the internet has formally outgrown the scale of its original design.
The term IPv4 address exhaustion (or depletion) describes the decreasing supply of unallocated Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4) addresses available at the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and the regional Internet registries (RIRs). They in turn assign for assignment to end users and local Internet registries, such as Internet service providers.
Due to the spectacular growth of internet connections in Asia in recent years and the growing need for multiple internet-connected devices in the West, have led to the dry up, but the depletion of the IPv4 allocation pool has already been a concern since the late 1980s, when the Internet started to experience dramatic growth. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) created the Routing and Addressing Group (ROAD) in November 1991 to respond to the scalability problem caused by the classful network allocation system in place at the time.
IANA’s primary address pool exhaustion became an imminent formality on February 1, 2011 when two of the remaining seven blocks were allocated to APNIC, the regional Internet registry for the Asia-Pacific region. As per ICANN policy, the last five blocks must be assigned by IANA, one to each Regional Internet Registry, exhausting IANA’s available IPv4 address space.
The anticipated shortage has been the driving factor in creating and adopting several new technologies, including classful networks in the 1980s, Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) methods in 1993, network address translation (NAT) and a new version of the Internet Protocol, IPv6, in 1998.
Today, on Thurday, Feb 8th, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) will allocate the last five batches of IP addresses.
Internet Protocol version 6 or IPv6 will be the successor for IPv4. With 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 new IP addresses, the world is unlikely to run out of IP’s any time soon, but the transition to the new system promises to be difficult.
IPv4 and IPv6 addresses will almost certainly run alongside one another for a number of years to come, but they aren’t compatible with one another. IPv4 and IPv6 aren’t the same language.
The other challenge is that most of the internet isn’t ready for IPv6. Only 2 percent of all websites are currently supporting it and ISP’s have been slow to adopt the new system.
IPv6 stacks on most operating systems are more often than not buggy and cause issues in existing network structures, so they are often found disabled.