North America Has Run Out of IP Addresses

The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), the regional internet registry body for the US, Canada, the Caribbean, and the North Atlantic Islands, has revealed that it has run out of IPv4 addresses.

There’s no need to panic, though: Europe ran out of IP addresses three years ago, with Africa the only region left with space addresses. It should, however, speed up the internet-wide upgrade to IPv6 – developed 17 years ago for this very eventuality – the process for which has been on-going for the last decade. Since IPv6 is not compatible with IPv4, though, its rollout is a laborious and time-consuming exercise. Since it could take upwards of thirty years to complete the conversion, IPv4 and IPv6 will still operate concurrently, called ‘dual-stacking’, even after most sites have moved over to the newer protocol.

While ARIN has been trying to conserve IP addresses through Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) and network address translation (NAT), the internet has expanded at a phenomenal rate, which is predicted to push the amount of internet connected devices globally to 75 billion within the next five years.

The industry most affected by a dearth of IP addresses is data centres. Companies that provide internet-based services, such as hosting and cloud storage, will be forced to make changes to their operations, with solutions like multiple servers sharing the same IP address impacting availability and performance.

Thank you Opendium for providing us with this information.