Panic – IPv4 Addresses Finally Exhausted
The central pool of IPv4 addresses officially ran dry on Tuesday after the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) allocated the last remaining blocks of address space. APNIC, which provides internet addressing services to the Asia Pacific region, received two /8s (33 million addresses) on Tuesday in a move that triggered the immediate distribution of the last five /8s to Regional Internet Registries. ISPs and businesses are rapidly burning through any IPv4 addresses APNIC makes available, so organisations in the region are expected to be among the first to feel the effects of IPv4 exhaustion. Bring on IPv6!
The organisation tracking the allocation of IPv4 declared 1 February X-Day (exhaustion day), conjuring images of Mad Max-style battles over the last remaining supplies of gasoline IPv4 addresses. In reality, the exhaustion of IPv4 has long been predicted but has remained a distant prospect until recently thanks to the use of Network Address Translation (NAT) technology, which meant banks of corporate PCs all sat behind small ranges of IP addresses. Many units of internet real estate are still sparsely used, with only around 14 per cent actually been utilised, according to a study by the University of Southern California, published on Tuesday.
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