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IPv4 addresses running out – quick


The folks who keep track of Internet IP addresses advised today that available IPv4 address space has dropped to only 4%.  They made a similar announcement in January of this year when we dropped to 10% availability.  You can read their release at http://www.nro.net/media/remaining-ipv4-address-below-5.html

Does this mean the Internet will shut down in less than a year? No, but there will be some big changes that could lead to increased costs as unprepared service providers scramble to upgrade to a newer standard, IPv6. While most network equipment and operating systems are ready for IPv6, very few service providers (only about 7.4% according to Hurricane Electric) are running IPv6 today.

IPv6 provides the world over 3.4×1038 (34,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) IP addresses, compared to about 4.3 billion (4,300,000,000) addresses in IPv4.  Most devices on the Internet, including cell phones, sensors, PC’s, routers, etc. have a unique IPv4 address today and those addresses are rapidly being used up.

InfoWest is already using IPv6 in it’s core network, and can provide IPv6 addresses to clients today.  We currently have three separate IPv6 peers, and by the end of the year, all our upstream connections to the Internet will also support IPv6.  We are one of the first independent ISP’s in Utah to support IPv6.

Eventually all internet connections may use IPv6, but businesses will be some of the first to require IPv6 capabilities.  We are ready today, and when you need to upgrade to IPv6, just give us a call and we’ll upgrade you the same day.

Learn more about IPv6 and the pending exhaustion of IPv4 at the following sites:

This entry was posted on October 18, 2010, 1:44 pm and is filed under General, Network Info, Press. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  1. #1 by randy on October 18, 2010 - 2:06 pm

    In case you were wondering, InfoWest was allocated only 2^92 (2 to the 92nd) amount of IPv6 addresses. We hope this will be sufficient for Southern Utah’s growth in the next few years. :) (This works out to also be 4.95176016 × 10^27)

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  2. #2 by Andrew Page on October 27, 2010 - 2:35 pm

    Thanks for posting this. I’ve been using IPv6 at home through HE’s tunnel for 1.5 years now, and used other tunnels before that, so this is really fantastic news. I wish more ISPs (independent or not) would pony up and follow suit. Posts like this one warm the deep recesses of my heart.

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