The available pool of unallocated Internet addresses using the older IPv4 protocol has now dipped below the 10 percent mark. There are now just 24 address blocks (each block is about 16-million IP addresses) that ICANN has not yet allocated to the Regional Internet Registries around the world.
ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is the entity that is responsible for the global coordination of the Internets unique number and address identifiers.
This is the time for the Internet community to act, said Rod Beckstrom, ICANNs President and Chief Executive Officer. For the global Internet to grow and prosper without limitation, we need to encourage the rapid widespread adoption of the IPv6 protocol.
IPv6 is the new protocol the Internet engineering community designed to cope with the increased demand for IP addresses, which are the unique identifiers that allow computers to communicate with one another over the Internet and to which DNS servers translate domain names. IPv4 addresses contain only 32 bits of data, while IPv6 addresses contain 128 bits.
Technical experts agree that the single biggest advantage of IPv6 is its capacity to accommodate Internet growth. For example, if all IPv4 address could fit within a Blackberry, it would take a storage device the physical size of the Earth to contain all available IPv6 addresses. There are 300 trillion trillion trillion possible IPv6 addresses. The smallest IPv6 address blocks that an Internet Service Provider (ISP) would typically allocate, of which there are over 2.3 million trillion, each contain more than 18 million trillion Internet usable network addresses far more than the entire world uses today with IPv4. These are available to any ISP or company in every corner of the globe.
Estimates are that it will probably take at least a couple of years to completely deplete the available pool of unallocated IPv4 addresses, but the adoption of IPv6 addresses will offer a number of advantages:
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