Experts predicted IPv4 exhaustion years ago. The reason for this is that IPv4 has a very limited design. In fact, there are only 4,294,967,296 unique IPv4 addresses available. Knowing that we have almost 8 billion people on our planet and that most of us have multiple devices, it’s easy to make the conclusion that there simply aren’t enough IPv4 addresses for each individual.
This is an issue because each device that can connect to the internet needs to have an IP address, which functions as a unique identifier and allows communication to happen. To resolve IPv4 exhaustion, IPv6 was developed.
The introduction of Internet Protocol version 6
This is where Internet Protocol version 6 came into the picture. The new Internet Protocol has a 128-bit address space. This means that there are 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 unique IPv6 addresses available, which is a lot more than IPv4. However, the transition to IPv6 is going incredibly slow.
So Will IPv4 Ever Go Away?
No one knows the exact answer. But we’d say probably, yes. Sooner or later organizations will have to migrate to IPv6. However, this will take a while, maybe even decades. Some of the reasons why are:
- IPv6 is not compatible with IPv4
- With the introduction of NAT the lifetime of IPv4 could be extended
- The costs of migration often outweigh the benefits
- Organizations are not ready yet to deploy IPv6 due to a lack of knowledge
- Devices running on IPv4 are not always compatible with IPv6
IPv6 at Hostio Solutions
Whilst most organizations rely heavily on IPv4, we’d still like to encourage the usage of IPv6. Therefore, you can now, affordably, lease IPv6 addresses at Hostio Solutions. The benefit of leasing IPv6 versus buying IPv6 is that you won’t have to commit to managing a complex and expensive RIPE account.
