IPv4, long a member of the engendered species list, might not make it through the end of the year, after four large batches of addresses were allocated to domain registries this week.
With all but a handful of the big blocks of IPv4 addresses gone, several groups are returning unused portions of their allocations in a trend that could extend the life of the aging architecture, if only briefly. With the maximum capacity of 4.3 billion addresses provided under IPv4 fast approaching, the writing is on the wall, and demand for IPv6 addresses is increasing rapidly. Enterprise Networking Planet has the story.
The end is near for IPv4.
The number of unallocated IPv4 address blocks declined this week after IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) distributed four slash 8 address blocks to a pair of Regional Internet Registries (RIRs). Each /8 address block contains 16 million IPv4 addresses. There are now only seven remaining blocks of unallocated IPv4 address space from IANA, which might not be enough to make it into 2011. At the beginning of 2010, IANA had forecast that there were 625 days worth of unallocated IPv4 addresses remaining.