14 DAY TRIAL // Due to a recent surge in IPv4 allocations in Asia, in major part owed to China's Internet boom, ICANN has recently announced that the total number of available IPv4 addresses has fallen below the 10% mark and is now approximated around the 400 million mark.
Not to cause any panic in IT circles, Rod Beckstrom, ICANN’s CEO and President, delivered this statement regarding the recent growth in IPv4 allocations, “It is important that the public understand that many of the IPv4 addresses that have been allocated have not yet been distributed to the public, so there will be no immediate global shortage of IPv4 addresses at the consumer level.”
While short steps have been made by many ISPs, public companies and ICANN itself, IPv6 has still a long way to go to reach its goal of replacing IPv4 completely and pave the way to a cybernetic future. ICANN representatives still dream of a future where every electronic device would have its own IP address, and everything could connect to the Internet from anywhere. The present state of IPv6 still leaves more to worry about than reasons to fall into fantasy scenarios.
“This is the time for the Internet community to act,” added Rod Beckstrom. “For the global Internet to grow and prosper without limitation, we need to encourage the rapid and widespread adoption of the IPv6 protocol.”
Replacing the IPv4 protocol with IPv6 will introduce no more than 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 IPv6 addresses. This will surely help the people at Comcast, who announced that the company would run out of IPv4 space. Soon after, they dove head-first into IPv6 testing, giving a preview of what is to come from other similar companies that ignored the IPv6 topic.
Expect to see more of these announcements in the future from all major ISPs. Meanwhile, YouTube is one of the successful examples where IPv6 has been tested and introduced in working environments.
