Less Than A Year Until IPv4 Exhaustion

An interesting milestone: there is less than a year remaining until the Internet runs out of IPv4 addresses, according to Hurricane Electric, which maintains a countdown clock on its IPv6 statistics page. Hurricane 's projection is one of a number of estimates as to when new IPv4 addresses will become unavailable, underscoring the need for network operators and sites to prepare for the implementation of the next-generation IPv6 protocol.

IPv6 will dramatically expand the number of addresses available for web sites, as well as millions of mobile devices with Internet access. The number of allocatable IP addresses under v4 has dropped to 240 million, according to Hurricane, which also tracks availability through the IPv4 Countdown Twitter feed.

Why is IPv6 important? Last year we spoke with John Curran, President and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), who provides a helpful overview of the IPv6 transition and what it may mean for providers, leading web sites, and you. This video runs about 9 minutes.