What happens when we run out of IPv4 addresses? <- Can no more devices connect to the internet?
In: Technology
Nothing?
Nothing personal, since I don’t know you, but devices actually connected to the Internet are rare. You might have a modem/router that has an IPv4 address, but that address isn’t really important to you. If your ISP couldn’t give you an IPv4 address, and gave you an IPv6 one instead, it’s unlikely you’d even know. How many people have you ever given your IP address to? That’s how only small parts of the Internet work.
You computer and xBox are on a local network with DHCP addresses controlled by that modem/router. That’s where the explosive growth in IoT devices is occurring. Since each modem/router likely has addresses for 65K+ devices, and you probably have <100 – it seems like you’re covered.
Some people will only be able to get IPv6 addresses, these people will not be able to talk to servers that do not have IPv6. Obviously money buys power, so it’s going to be people on cheaper ISPs (think cell phone users in poorer countries), these people won’t be able to go to websites that are hosted on servers without IPv6 (mostly sites that are old and outdated). as time goes on more and more people will be IPv6 only, people will have to pay a premium for IPv4 and more people will support IPv6.
It just means organisations and ISP’s will only be able to buy blocks of IPv6 addresses.
The IPv4 in use will still be used, just their is a VERY limited number of IPv4’s available to buy. Companies sell back address blocks they don’t need, as well as those that go bust, so their will always be a handful of spare addresses around.
Day to day for us, their won’t be much of a change since we’re already using the IPv4 addresses. But we’ll see a transition by most ISP’s and Host providers to move users over to using IPv6 addresses and “retire” IPv4 to legacy equipment usage (i.e. old devices that can’t handle IPv6 addresses).
Running out of IPv4 does not mean the internet crashes to a halt. It just means their are none available to buy and we’ll have to use IPv6 as default.
We start using IPv6.
As simple as that.
We’ve known that end of IPv4 was coming a long, long time ago.
And yes – once all IPv4 addresses have been given out, no more can be given. Which is why there was such increased support for IPv6 in modern devices.
they’ve already implemented IPv6… per [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_address#IPv6_addresses), “In IPv6, the address size was increased from 32 bits in IPv4 to 128 bits, thus providing up to 2^128 (approximately 3.403×1038) addresses. This is deemed sufficient for the foreseeable future.”
Well, yes. That is exactly what will happen.
Once all the IPv4 addresses available are in use, nothing else can connect “directly” to the internet. Thanks to things like NAT (Network Address Translation) and CIDR (Classless Inter-Domain Routing) before that, we have been able to avoid running out, but there are no more IPv4 addresses available. You can still buy blocks of addresses, but no more are available to be given out.
The answer should be “switch to IPv6,” but since IPv6 has been around for like, a long time and a lot of organizations haven’t made the switch, I feel like it’s going to take catastrophe for the change to take place.
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