Internet Addresses Have Run Out!

Its official. As of Thursday the 3rd of February, 2011, the world's pool of IP addresses has been allocated. Further to our last story on IPv6 (article here), the roll out is well underway, and we should have a seamless transition from IPv4. Some people may need to upgrade their modems or routers to work with the new protocol, but your ISP should let you know what you need to do.

Internet Addresses Running Out!

The world's allocation of IP addresses will be exhausted in a matter of weeks. This will mean that Internet Service Providers will need to start sharing addresses, or implement IPv6 protocols.

At the moment, we are running on IPv4 protocols, which allows roughly 4 billion addresses. With the popularity of the Internet in the late 90's and the prevalence of mobile computing devices, all requiring their own unique IP address, the pool of addresses is predicted to run out this year. The long term solution is IPv6, which will allow 3.4*10^38 addresses (that is 34 with 37 zeros after it!)

On June 8, there will be a global test run of the new protocol, to make sure there are no problems before a wide scale implementation.

What do you need to do? When the Australian ISP's go over to IPv6, we will need to upgrade our routers, modems and other Internet connectivity equipment to be able to communicate using the new protocols. Stay tuned to dcnsolutions.net/blog to hear more!

See source article at test-ipv6.com