The Internet Has Officially Run Out Of IP Addresses

Filed under: Industry News

The Number Resource Organization (NRO), an industry group made up of five regional Internet provider registries, held an event in Montevideo, Uruguay, today where members announced that it had today handed out the last of the available ipv4 addresses.

“This is truly a major turning point in the on-going development of the Internet,” said Rod Beckstrom, President and CEO of ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the organization responsible for assigning IP addresses. “Nobody was caught off guard by this, the Internet technical community has been planning for… depletion for quite some time.”

Now all new Internet addresses will use IPv6, a system that has more numbers and characters, and is said to have enough spots for 340 trillion, trillion, trillion unique IP addresses.

What is interesting is a lot of these numbers are held by persons and groups that should not have them. I know one person that owned a Class C for years and never used it or gave it up as some type of badge of honor or something… and what about Harley Daividson why do they own so many addresses? or at least they useto… they are a motorcycle company not a computer network.

Comcast begins deployment of ipv6 Modems.

It has been a long time coming but the testing has begun at one of the world’s largest networks for the changeover from ip4 to ip6 addresses.

If you know anyone in Europe then you probably have seen ip6 addresses used but in the USA networks are still using older ipv4 addresses that are now near depletion.  This new change will require millions of users to upgrade to new hardware and if you are one of those people that bought your own cable modem to save $7 a month in rental costs your monthly bill will probably now require the rental of your cable modem.

That kinda ticks me off because the rental costs recover the full cost of the modem in half a year and to be forced to rent boxes is just kinda wrong because they should be free.

Anyway the roll out has started in Littelton, Colorado where a handful of customers have been outfitted with cable modems that can use both ip4 and ip6 addressees.