Today, I watched a historic moment over a webcast. The release of the final /8 IPv4 addresses (39/8 and 106/8, approximately 33,554,432 IP addresses to RIPE.) which means once those addresses have been allocated to ISP’s, Websites, Servers etc then the internet cannot grow without re-use of unused IP’s.
In the short term, there will be no noticeable difference but in the long term then this will become more of a problem but don’t fret, there is a solution!
IPv6, it’s uptake is slow but steady (or at least according to IANA/ICANN), IPv6 has an addressing space of 3.4×10^38 which is in understandable terms, (340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456), 340 billion billion billion billion addresses. Compared to the 4billion (4,294,967,296) IPv4 addresses.
So is this the end of an experimental technology which was not meant to last the 35years it has and also the dawn of a new internet era.