IPcalypse Now — Less Than 4 days Until IPv4 Exhaustion

The number of available IPv4 addresses is rapidly shrinking down to zero. IPv4, which uses an address space of 32-bits (four bytes, as in 255.255.255.255), is expected to be exhausted by Wednesday afternoon. Not to worry though, as IPv6, which has a whopping 128-bits of address space (8 x 16-bit words), is already deployed and is expected to be tenable for considerably longer. Unless, of course, the Internet of Things happens, in which case we’ll run out by Christmas*.

Anyway, if you’d like to watch the numbers count down to zero, here are some IPv4 countdown clocks (none of which appear synchronized to each other):

Hurricane Electric’s Week-Day-Hour-Minute-Second Dial Clock (pictured above).

inetcore’s IPv4 Exhaustion Counter – I like this one because it shows you the realtime IP availability number.

British Telecom’s IPv4 Countdown.

or you can follow @IPv4Countdown on twitter.

*just kidding (I hope).

Filed under: internet of things,random — Tags: internet of things — by johngineer, posted January 30, 2011 at 9:01 am

Comments (4)

4 Comments

Time for a good cleanup! The ICANN/IANA must have a lot of unused IPv4 address ranges laying around that are not being used. I know for a fact that the WHOIS database still holds a record for a class-C address range of a company I worked for that hasn’t been used (or been paid for) for probably 12 or 14 years. There must be many such abandoned addresses and I wonder if a market is going to pop up to sell those to the highest bidder…

Comment by d0sh — January 30, 2011 @ 3:59 pm

According to Wikipedia the surface of the earth is 510 km² or 510e12 m² wide. Distribute 2^128 IP Adresses and you’ll get 6,7e23 IP-Adresses/m². So who cares if every fucking “Thing” had his own IP? Nobody.

Comment by Do the math! — February 1, 2011 @ 4:46 am

Too bad IPv6 only has 32bits of globally routable networks (the only things that count). So not that much bigger than IPv4 with 32bits of globally routable addresses when you assume an average of 50 hosts/network…

Stupid design-by-commitee protocol.

Comment by blerik — February 1, 2011 @ 8:44 am

“is already deployed”

Good luck actually passing ipv6 traffic on the majority of networks right now.

And just because Arin runs out does not mean that the ISPs with the blocks don’t have reserves. A lot of the larger providers will be able to resubnet for a while.

Comment by Mike — February 1, 2011 @ 7:21 pm

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